From Clybourne Park and Stick Fly to Becky Shaw and Detroit, American playwrights suddenly seem to be grappling with the issue of class—and our “haves-and-have-nots” zeitgeist. Perhaps no play exemplifies this micro-trend better than David Lindsay-Abaire’s Tony-nominated Good People, which ran at the Manhattan Theatre Club last season and goes up at the Geffen Playhouse beginning April 3 under Matt Shakman’s direction.
As the recession deepened in 2009, Lindsay-Abaire kept hearing the question, “Where are the new American plays about class?” While class is a frequent preoccupation of British dramatists, the American theatre has largely shunned the thorny topic in recent decades. Still, Lindsay-Abaire says, “I had no interest in writing one of those didactic plays that rattle the saber and say, you know, that the system is broken and stacked against poor, working-class America.”
Tackling a play about class, he realized, would dovetail with another subject he wanted to explore—his own roots in Boston’s working-class South Boston enclave. It’s a world that, he says, he’d “frankly been scared to write about before…because I felt a very deep respect and responsibility toward the people there.”
Indeed, as a brainy and creative 11-yearold growing up near the Old Colony housing projects in “Southie,” Lindsay-Abaire earned a scholarship from the Boys & Girls Club to attend Milton Academy, a tony prep school. Every day, he walked to the subway past the winos and drug addicts to arrive in a posh world to which he had to adjust. “I lived inside both those worlds every day for six years. Everything about me is attached to the idea of struggling between classes.”
The play that Lindsay-Abaire eventually dreamt up centers around a sharp-tongued single mom, Margie Walsh (played at the Geffen by Jane Kaczmarek), who loses her job as a cashier and approaches an old high school friend she once dated to see if he might have work for her. Having “escaped” the traps of the neighborhood, Mike (Jon Tenney) is now a doctor living in a rich suburb with his wife and infant daughter. The two characters playfully butt heads as Margie, facing possible eviction, considers a desperate move to help pull herself and her special-needs daughter out of their struggling existence.
“There’s this myth in America that we can all accomplish anything if we just work hard enough. Is that really true?” the writer wonders rhetorically. “Or are there, in fact, people who are born in circumstances that they really cannot escape. Yes, hard work matters. But what role does luck play in whatever success we might find?”
Indeed, the playwright believes that Good People resonates even more strongly now than when it opened last year. “The issues have literally spilled out onto the streets of our country. That phrase—‘the 99 percent’—didn’t exist when I wrote Good People. In fact, the play is very much about the 99 percent breaking into that 1 percent’s house and staying there for two hours.”
