There’s a lot to like in these ‘Good People’

Lindsay-Abaire creates another compelling drama

March 04, 2011|Don Aucoin, Globe Staff

NEW YORK — With regard to dramas set in South Boston, the law of diminishing returns is bound to kick in at some point.

But not yet. Not when Southie can inspire a play like David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Good People,’’ which maps the fault lines of social class with a rare acuity of perception while also packing a substantial emotional wallop.

“Good People,’’ which opened last night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a Manhattan Theatre Club production directed by Daniel Sullivan, is studded with references to the clam rolls at Sully’s, Whitey Bulger, and the Sugar Bowl. But the playwright, a South Boston native whose “Rabbit Hole’’ won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama (and was adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman), is after something much deeper than the splashes of local color that enlivened the likes of “Good Will Hunting’’ and “The Departed.’’

Word by well-chosen word, Lindsay-Abaire weighs the cost of identities discarded and constructed, of upward mobility with all its complications and contradictions, of memory when it turns selective and self-serving, of sacrifices made but unacknowledged, of choices that are not choices at all.

Yet for all of the playwright’s sizable skill, it is Frances McDormand who gives “Good People’’ its vital, beating heart.

McDormand, best-known for her Oscar-winning turn in “Fargo,’’ delivers a wrenching performance as Margaret Walsh, nicknamed Margie, a newly unemployed single mother whose lifetime of disappointment and struggle is written on her careworn countenance.

Margie’s economic plight propels her into a confrontation with Mike (Tate Donovan), an ex-boyfriend whom she hasn’t seen for three decades, since he went off to college, became a doctor, and left Southie far behind.

Or so he thinks. Then Margie shows up at his office looking for a job and spoiling for a fight. They inhabit different worlds: Mike, who grew up in the Old Harbor projects, is now a reproductive endocrinologist and living in Chestnut Hill. Margie still lives in the old neighborhood and has just been fired from a Dollar Store.

Margie’s supervisor, Stevie (Patrick Carroll), was ordered by higher-ups to can her because she was late once too often for work — a circumstance brought about by the pressures of caring for her grown daughter, who suffers from severe mental retardation. Unable to make next month’s rent, Margie now faces the possible loss of her apartment, a fact made abundantly clear by Dottie, her landlady, who is played by Estelle Parsons in full over-the-top “Roseanne’’ mode.