THEATRE: GOOD PEOPLE A TAD SURREAL
Part of story’s heft is lost because of Boston accent
Good People Until April 24 | The Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage Tickets & Info: ArtsClub.com
There’s an increasing understanding that the line between poor and rich is less about choices you make than about a million tiny bits of luck that keep some moving up while others get stuck at the bottom.
Now running at the Arts Club’s Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, Good People, by American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, is a dark comedy about a clash between two such people in Boston — downtrodden Margaret, played by Colleen Wheeler, and successful Mike, performed by Scott Bellis.
When we first meet Margaret, she’s on the verge of losing her job at the dollar store because of chronic lateness. The single mother of a grown child with an unidentified collection of developmental issues, Margaret struggles to keep herself afloat as middle age grinds her down.
She’s not one of those sunny, sexy poor people that we see so often on stages. She’s crass, can be caustic, and has no space in her life for naive optimism — all she needs is a job, any job. Mike, an old boyfriend who escaped their neighbourhood to become a doctor with a thriving practice in reproductive technology, offers only the faintest glimmer of hope, but it’s clear early on that it will probably lead nowhere unless Mike can find it in himself to be a better person than he is.
Lindsay-Abaire’s script is sharply funny, but beneath the humour is the feeling of a slowly building anxiety dream, where pieces of your past come back to haunt you. The dialogue is deceptively simple, offering plenty of opportunities for the actors to inject emotional depth. It takes up the poverty of its characters and succeeds in turning the issue around again and again, presenting the prism of views on their struggles in a surprisingly organic way before landing with its moral axis firmly on Margaret’s side.
Lauchlin Johnston’s interlocking set pieces are shoved up to the front of the stage, implicating the audience and creating a palpable sense of being trapped as much by space as by the circumstances. The scenes take their time in building the tension to a point where even a reveal that feels fairly obvious draws audible gasps from the audience.
Wheeler and Bellis make formidable opponents. Bellis aptly reprises a little of his cowardly creep from his turn in The Rival’s earlier this year while Wheeler touches perfectly on Margaret’s mix of toughness and vulnerability. The cast of secondary characters are pleasingly real, particularly Patti Allan as Margaret’s anarchic landlord Dotti and Jenn Griffin as Margaret’s cheeky best friend Jeanne.
Sereana Malani does her best with Mike’s beleaguered wife Kate, although there are moments where she has little to do but wait and watch while Margaret and Mike talk circles around each other. Out of that cast, Ben Elliott alone feels a little hammy, perhaps because he has to juggle his challenging accent with the script’s mix of humour and heart.
Indeed, the play’s Achilles heel is its heavily worked Irish-inflected South Boston accents that have the unfortunate effect of distancing us from the emotional heft of the story. And I’m not sure I’m on board with the choice to have certain jokes played directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall when so much effort is otherwise put into naturalism.
In the end, though Good People provides some surprisingly poignant insights, there remains something a little surreal about watching a play about crushing poverty in a theatre that charges such high prices, in a city that’s increasingly home to both absurd wealth and abject poverty. How many of those insights will travel beyond the theatre? And, if the discomfort does make it beyond the doors, what will come of it?