‘Good Goods’: A Southern town confronts its past in a Crowded Fire play.
‘Good Goods’: Playwright jams 3 decades of African American history into a 24-hour story onstage — of course, in the end, it’s all about love
Telling a story that spans 24 hours while encompassing three decades of history within its narrative arc might seem like a challenge, but it’s one that playwright Christina Anderson is ready for.
Anderson’s latest play, “Good Goods,” fluidly chronicles haunted pasts, forbidden loves and hardly containable obsessions that creep into an uncharted black American Southern town. The protagonist, a young man named Stacey Good, returns to the town in which he grew up to run his family’s general store in the aftermath of amysterious invasion that has left the world of the town’s inhabitants in arrears.
Throughout the course of the play, sexuality, race, obsession, ownership and black American history collide.
Marissa Wolf, artistic director of Crowded Fire, says she’s excited to collaborate with Anderson once again, after the successful 2009 premiere of Anderson’s play “Drip.” In 2010, the first iteration of Anderson’s “Good Goods” was featured in Crowded Fire’s Matchbox Reading Series, which set the stage for a future production.
“Three years later, our relationship, our shared understanding of theatricality and the construction of race and politics onstage … has allowed a really vital collaboration,” Wolf says.
Anderson says she considers “Drip” and “Good Goods” ensemble pieces, meaning they require a tight cast to tell the story. “Marissa constructs that dynamic from day one,” the playwright says. “She creates an invested community with each production.”
The idea for the play emerged from a writing assignment focused on possession that Anderson was given while a student in the playwriting program at Yale.
“You have characters who want to own something or someone … and there are spirits that inhabit humans in the world. Within that world, I created characters who thirst for love and connection,” she says.
Concomitant with the idea of possession is that of love. The play examines relationships between men and women, “what it means to have love, to be in love, to want love,” Anderson says.
“Good Goods” spans 33 years of black American history — from 1961 to 1994 — which was an exciting challenge for Anderson, who wanted these periods to exist simultaneously onstage. “I wanted layers of cultural, social and political history present all at once.”
In looking at American history over the period of time she examines in the play, Anderson says she was fascinated by the number of events that could have been considered an “invasion” — ranging from drug epidemics to hippie culture to civil rights. “There are so many movements in such a short period of time that possessed the American psyche.”
The fragmented, time-andspace-bending nature of the play was a fun challenge for Wolf. Anderson’s “use of the sliding scale of time allows for a more heightened, nonnaturalistic approach to the design elements, as the central question of creating this haunted landscape required both the constant presence of industrialization … and the feeling that something happened to this landscape that left it colonized in some way,” Wolf says.
Like Anderson’s other works, “Good Goods” is a piece that celebrates the power of performance and storytelling, while maintaining its atmosphere of mystery and straddling the divide between surrealism and naturalism.
“It’s a play that won’t answer every question, but it presents unique ideas and characters that we can understand and hopefully care about,” Anderson says.