Good People

Samuel J. Friedman Theater

New York

(212) 239-6200

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

***

Since “it’s a given that we don’t talk about class in this country,” few plays ever seriously probe the subject, said Scott Brown in New York. Although it breaks this taboo, the new drama by Pulitzer winner David Lindsay-Abaire—set mainly in the working-class Boston neighborhood of Southie—isn’t particularly audacious. Rather, it’s a “fine, small, heartfelt work” that contains acute observations on the American economic divide. At the play’s center is Margie, a newly unemployed mother of a mentally disabled adult. Besides being an ex-dollar-store worker, Margie is a mixture of coarseness, kindness, and resignation. As played by the “ferociously talented” Frances McDormand, she is also the playwright’s “richest, most fabulously flawed character yet.”

The process of getting to know Margie provides “one of the more subtly surprising treats of this theater season,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Born and raised in Southie, “her most basic notions of herself are tied up in her identification with that neighborhood,” one of the main reasons she’s “never escaped its particular culture of poverty and loyalty.” In Act 2, she ventures to the plush suburb of Chestnut Hill to visit Mike, her onetime Southie boyfriend, hoping she can wrangle a job from him. She’s not above guilting him into providing help, labeling him “lace-curtain Irish” for forgetting the streets he came from. In turn, Tate Donovan makes Mike “an artful study in willed amnesia, and the pain that surprises him when Margie summons the ghosts of their shared past is all the more palpable by not being directly expressed.”

For all the insights about class provided by the script, “it is McDormand who gives Good People its vital, beating heart,” said Don Aucoin in The Boston Globe. Even when she is “simply watching others talk,” it’s hard not to fixate on her “shifting reflections of resentment, regret, fear, hope, compassion, anger, and sadness.” Bolstered by the playwright’s “keen ear for the way Bostonians talk,” her performance is remarkably authentic (whereas Donovan “overdoes his accent” a bit). When Margie breaks down the sequence of events that led to her firing, starting with a broken tooth and a lack of insurance, it “brilliantly” refutes the idea that all those “scuffling on the margins” chose their own fates.