Our evening of strong theatre and tasty dinner was mussed at the end, when we couldn’t get a taxi. The weather was lovely and it wasn’t late, but every taxi that passed by was taken. An off-duty driver who declined to take us mumbled something about President Obama, who, we would find out later, was in town for the evening. (There ought to be a law banning sitting presidents from the island of Manhattan — and they can stash the United Nations in Queens while they’re at it.) I never did figure out a connection between the president and the dearth of free taxis. By the time Kathleen finally hailed one, we were a block from the subway entrance at 51st and Lex, a long way from the theatre. If I’d known that there was going to be a problem with the taxis, I’d have shepherded us to the N train at 49th Street, and we’d have been home in no time. But there was no indication of a taxi problem, and I was sorely vexed by the stupidity of it all. I didn’t feel entitled to a taxi; what I felt entitled to, as a city dweller, was better information. Standing on a streetcorner waiting for a taxi that is never going to come seems definitionally stupid, and the worst thing about the stupidity of others is that it’s contagious; it annoys me so much that I become stupid, too. 

Stupidity was much on my mind after the performance of David Lindsay-Abaire’s new play, Good People, that we saw at MTC. One aspect of the play — it’s flawed aspect, if you ask me — is the problem that a woman from South Boston, Margaret, can’t hold a job. Without an education, Margaret can’t earn enough to pay someone reliable to look after her daughter, a grown woman in years only, born prematurely with severe impairment. This is a terrible predicament, obviously, but it is not a dramatic one, and not essential to the action. It has been laid over the real story as a kind of insurance, because of course the (affluent) audience will be disturbed (and engaged) by Margaret’s struggle to survive. That no one should be faced with such struggles is as obvious as the evil of the struggle itself. What’s stupid about Margaret’s situation is that she usually loses her job because she doesn’t show up on time. Her car has been repossessed, or her caregiver of the moment is sleeping off a hangover, or whatever. This subjects her to the moronic caprice of managers who swear by time sheets. I don’t think that the playwright wants us to meditate on the stupidity of treating workers — especially ill-paid ones — like pieces of machinery that differ from real machinery in shouldering responsibility for their own good repair. The injustice of it, perhaps. But only a stupid person would hold Margaret’s unpunctuality against her, whatever its causes, provided that Margaret otherwise did her job. It’s stupid (but widespread among the dim bulbs who manage American workers) to regard showing up on time as an important part of any menial job. This a point that doesn’t give a dramatist much to work with. Stupidity always betrays itself by its failure to be interesting. 

Margaret was played by the formidable Frances McDormand, one of the more terrifying actresses working today. With the savage impassivity of an ancient demigod, she can lead from sociable greeting to searing question from which all flinching evasion is impossible. And that is Margaret’s role in Good People: she is a nemesis brought forward to sort out the bourgeois vainglory of an old flame by the name of Mike (Tate Donovan). Mike escaped the South End by dint of scholarships, and he is now a prosperous reproductive endocrinologist, with a wife and daughter and a house in Chestnut Hill. He has fidelity issues, we learn, but there’s something more interesting the matter with him: he can’t let his Southie past go. He has become active with a boys’ club, which is how, after all these years, he gets picked up on Margaret’s radar. Otherwise, he has nothing to do with the old neighborhood itself, but he wears a romanticized version of his youth as a “hoodlum” that clearly gains him traction in the relatively rarefied professional circles in which he actually lives. His wife, Kate (Renée Elise Goldsberry), is the daughter of an eminent African-American doctor in Washington, under whom Mike trained, and she is clearly drawn to him because he had the rough life that ought to have been hers by virtue of skin color. Mike’s hubris compels him to pretend that he is still a Southie beneath the polish. 

Which is why he yields to Margaret’s challenge. Having heard about his boys’ club activities, Margaret is encouraged to visit his office for old-time’s sake and also to ask him for a job. (I am convinced that Mr Lindsay-Abaire could have thought of a less melodramatic but equally urgent pretext for Margaret’s visit; I can think of at least one very good one.) In the  course of their edgy banter — Margaret has pretty much elbowed her way into Mike’s office — it evolves that Kate is going to be throwing Mike a big birthday party in a few days. Desperately bold, Margaret asks if she can come. Perhaps, she says, one of his friends will have an opening. But then again, she adds, perhaps he would be ashamed of her. Mike is too vain to admit this — to acknowledge that he has become someone who would be embarrassed for his old Southie buddies (much less an old girlfriend) to meet his new friends and associates. There is nothing at all generous about the invitation that he eventually extends. 

Nor, for the matter of that, is there anything friendly about Margaret’s acceptance. When, a day or so later, Mike calls to tell her that the party has been canceled because his daughter is sick, she doesn’t believe him; she tells her friends that she has been “disinvited.” She decides to go out to Chestnut Hill (which she has never visited before) anyway. This provides the playwright with the opportunity to write a virtuoso scene for three people, and Mr Lindsay-Abaire rises beautifully to the occasion. A digest of Margaret’s evening with Mike and Kate would yield a catalgue of dramatic peripeties that would make Aristotle hop, and yet the action flows naturally through its arduous twists. (Part of the secret is that the audience is in on all the secrets beforehand.) With only minor changes in accent and tone, this long scene might have climbed to a genuinely tragic dénouement; Mr Donovan and Ms Goldsberry would have been Ms McDormand’s equal in rendering plausible tragedy. I don’t for a minute fault the playwright for declining to pursue that option. It’s enough that he makes its possibility felt. 

For Good People is a comedy at heart — another reason why the out-of-work plot point seems heavy-handed. When she is not barging in on canceled parties, Margaret lives her days in the old neighborhood, hoping to win at Bingo. The other people in her world, aside from the offstage child, are Stevie (Patrick Carroll), the dollar store manager who’s required by his manager to fire her, Jean (Becky Ann Baker), the hotel waitress who bumps into Mike at a boys’ club affair, and Dottie, Margaret’s pepetually soused landlady, a woman with Phyllis Diller hair and a heart of stone. Estelle Parsons almost steals Good People as Dottie; Dottie is rude, vulgar, dim and self-justifying, and Estelle Parsons makes her funny at all of that. (The ghost of Mary Louise Burke’s performances in Fuddy Meers and Kimberly Akimbo lingers in the way the part has been written.) But Ms Baker and Mr Campbell managed not to be eclipsed by the clowning. Frances McDormand finds new depths to deadpan, and her Margaret, a shambolic mess on paper, is a woman to reckon with. 

John Lee Beatty’s versatile set, with its camera-shutter curtain, was beautifully lighted by Pat Collins, and David Zinn’s costumes were just right; they might have been much bleaker. Margaret’s party turnout (especially her inadequately set hair) deserves special mention.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.