By Chuck Conconi
Arena Stage has two successful plays in performance: a traditional, artful and moving Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire, and Metamorphoses, a gimmicky take on a waterlogged interpretation of Ovid by Mary Zimmerman.
Enthusiastic Arena’s audiences are filling the theatre where Metamorphoses is performed in the round with a large pool of water that fills the entire stage. The acting in the vast, wading pool feels occasionally like a trip to Sea World to watch performing dolphins as the actors, like the dolphins, intentionally flail about, purposely splashing the audience. The first two rows are supplied with towels for protection and the people sitting in them appear to completely enjoy the experience.
Somewhere in all the splashing about is an episodic interpretation of Ovid, focusing on several Gods and mortals – King Midas, Orpheus, Poseidon, Narcissus, Cupid – offering a range of emotions from love and romance to loss and redemption. It’s all there, with the Gods and mortals behaving badly, but even though there are effective moments, much of the drama is lost in the provocative splashing about.
Although this was a Tony award winning, Broadway smash with audiences attracted by a unique watery experience of classic legends and seeing actors wading and splashing through the performance, it plays and feels like what it was – a drama student’s project. In fact, Zimmerman started it as a student at Northwestern University, where she still teaches.
Good People, on the other hand, is a poignant look back at the “Southie,” Boston Irish working class neighborhood where the playwright Lindsay-Abaire grew up. It is an ageless drama about those who will never or are incapable of leaving, and those who make good and get away, in this case to become “lace curtain Irish,” a harsh, unwelcomed pejorative.
In a quote from Lindsay-Abaire in the Arena Stage Playbill, he said he delayed writing about the old neighborhood: “There are a lot of reasons I never wrote about Southie until now, but the short answer is I was terrified. You love and care about these people deeply, and you don’t want to misrepresent them. We get offended easily, when the stories being put out there are that we’re all criminals and racists.”
And his loving portrayal of the old neighborhood he left behind is evident. It isn’t necessary to be Irish or to be from South Boston to understand and be moved by the Southie lives, anymore than it also isn’t necessary to be black to appreciate August Wilson’s loving look at Pittsburgh where he grew up in the Hill neighborhood. Both tell effective, emotional stories.
The three women, who dominate Good People, spend time over coffee or playing bingo at a church hall, gossiping or advising Margaret, sensitively portrayed by Johanna Day on what to do to find a job. She has just been fired from her low paying position as a cashier in a grocery store. As a single parent she is desperate about finding another menial position so she can make rent and find dependable care for her retarded daughter.
Her friends, against her better, but desperate judgment, convince her to go downtown to seek employment help from a former Southie boyfriend, Mike, played by the incomparable Washington, veteran actor, Andrew Long. Mike isn’t especially happy to see Margaret. He is now a doctor and living in comfort in the suburbs with a wife and daughter and resents Margaret calling him “lace curtain Irish.”
Some of the best moments of the play are when Margaret and her two friends, (Dottie), Rosemary Knower, and (Jean), Amy McWilliams, sit around the kitchen table over coffee or at bingo night. Those scenes are wonderfully funny, and are also an insight into what makes up Lindsay-Abaire’s good people and why he loves them. They care about each other and are there for each other even though they don’t have good answers to Margaret’s problems. They are all out of aspirations of success and a better life.
An uncomfortable situation arises when Margaret then makes an unexpected visit to Mike’s suburban home and his young wife, Francesca Choy-Kee, a talented young actress with a big career ahead of her. There are amusing and troubling complications than do not serve anyone well. In the end, Margaret is back in “Southie” and finds that (Stevie) Michael Glenn, an overlooked neighborhood man who was forced to fire her, represents the essence of what Good People is all about.
Director Jackie Maxwell deftly moves his actors through his nostalgic and often painful look back without allowing the play to become maudlin or farcical. There is also smoothness in designer Todd Rosenthal’s settings of a shabby back alley, Margaret’s “Southie” kitchen, Mike’s tony suburban home, and the church bingo hall where the four neighborhood friends maintain an amusing but revelatory chatter while bingo numbers are being called off and they stamp their bingo cards.
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