Good People

It's often uncomfortable to watch a show about the contemporary poor on Broadway. There you are, having spent a significant amount of money to watch a play, indicating your own expendable income. And on stage are people just scraping by, presentationally at least. You might be asked to feel bad for them, worse you might be asked to pity them, or worst you might be asked to deify them for their spirit. Any of the options tends to leave you (me) feeling like an asshole who spent a family's food budget for the week for the opportunity to sit in a dark theater and watch people perform for you.

Happily, Good People is a show about people scraping by that very nearly dares you to pass judgment based on the main character Margie (hard G) played by Frances McDormand. You might want to judge her for being so aggressive, but the next scene will significantly soften your attitude toward her. And then another scene comes along and makes you think she might be a bitch after all. Eventually you settle in and accept that you're not being asked to look at Margie as a stand-in for all the downtrodden people of South Boston. She's an individual character brought fully and remarkably to life by Frances McDormand.What becomes satisfying is that while Good People deals in issues of money and class, it is not a play about being poor. It's a play about one woman's very complicated life and is driven by her need to find gainful employment. She's not going to be arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, and you know she won't tumble head over feet into a life on the streets selling her hair for money, but the stakes are still high enough that her urgency is well-placed and sets the plot in beautiful motion.

Margie's friend and landlord (the exceptional and hysterical Becky Ann Baker and Estelle Parsons) lead her to consider approaching her high school ex-boyfriend (a wonderful Tate Donovan) to see about getting a job. He has escaped Southie and become a doctor, and Margie thinks he might owe her just enough favor to let her answer phones or point her towards someone who might have work open.

What follows is a play that gently expands to encompass larger and larger issues and develop more and more momentum. It's a well-formed, old fashioned play in the best of sense. All the pieces will fit. All the scenes play out at a realistic, almost leisurely pace, and every time you think you know what the play is "about," something comes along to gently confound your expectations.

It also helps that the play is very, very funny. For a show that opens with the main character losing her job and is centrally concerned with her inability to provide for her developmentally disabled daughter, there are a lot of jokes, and they all land. Credit to the ridiculously well-balanced ensemble that resists the urge to showboat even though each has ample opportunity to do so.

At play's end, I didn't feel I had seen anything revolutionary or utterly new, but I was left with the incredibly satisfying feeling of seeing a perfectly constructed play beautifully performed. As the seasons winds down, it is to me the best new play that's arrived. I still need to see Jerusalem (next week), but given the outpouring of love for the remedial War Horse, I'm sure that's going to win the Tony. Well...it was better than High.