Good People, a New Play About Chance, Decisions and Fate

A short note on Good People, the title of a new play at the Manhattan Theatre Club starring Frances McDormand –

It’s a simple story, at some level, about a middle-aged woman from south Boston who loses her job. She has a disabled, adult daughter who needs caregiving, and she needs money. She contacts some old friends, and scours the neighborhood for a job. She encounters a once-boyfriend, just for a summer at the end of her childhood, who’s become a doctor with a fancy office and a fancy house and a beautiful wife.

And she’s angry, angry because she’s never been able to leave her community despite, as she puts it, “being nice.” She put her daughter’s needs first and helped others when she could – or so she says, but she was too often late for work at one job and the next, because she was waiting for the daughter’s sitter, or because she couldn’t pay the bill on her car, or for some reason or other unfortunate event, as she sees it, that isn’t quite her fault.

The play’s well-executed, with firm acting and revealing details – like the wallpaper and mismatched furnishings  in the woman’s kitchen, and the spotty sportswear the women don when they go out to be sociable. Some scenes take place in a church, where the characters chat as they play “BINGO,” waiting and hoping for a lucky break.

It’s about fate, and responsibility, and assumptions people sometimes make. And it’s closing this Sunday.

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