At the beginning of Good Bones, Travis (Mamoudzou Athie), a chef about to open a restaurant, is talking to contractor Earl (Khris Davis) in the home he and wife Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson) are refurbishing. He explains that for him necessary elements are always “charm” and “character.” He might as well be announcing that Aisha, Earl and he are in a play about to bust with character and charm.
Surely, that’s what playwright James Ijames wants audiences to understand in this follow-up to his 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning Fat Ham, which could boast character, if not genteel charm. Not that charm was Ijames’ aim in that one, though raucous humor definitely was.
This time he dispenses character and charm—nothing raucous—from start to end, while seriously indulging in large dollops of depth. Increasingly, Aisha and Travis become immersed in it so seriously that the marriage, remaining resonant of charm and character, is endangered.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
What’s the problem? There are several in a plot that smartly raises questions for which there are no fast answers, perhaps no satisfying answers at all. The clashing subjects are, primarily, the effects of an American class system that too often remains unaddressed—even unacknowledged—as well as the unceasing gentrification compulsively going on coast to coast.
Though ostensibly living in a happily-ever-after union, Travis and Aisha come from different backgrounds. He’s from an upper-class Black family. He’s used to money, inured to comfort he expects will always continue. She was brought up in the projects and early on decided that to better herself, she’d have to wage an upward struggle.
Now she has a degree in urban planning and is involved with a project that has strong personal meaning for her, an endeavor on which she’s stoked an unflinching belief in herself. Because she regards her growing up in a community that, as she sees it, has no way to instill dignity, she’s become part of a proposal to dismantle her erstwhile homestead and replace it with contemporary amenities, e. g. a sports arena. (If Brooklyn and the Barclay Center come to patrons’ minds, so be it.)
At this endeavor, Aisha has a combatant, and it’s not Travis, who takes his earlier plush life so much for granted that he doesn’t entirely offer the understanding she’d like. No, her opponent is Earl, who’s working on the home Aisha and Travis are renovating with a budget where even the cost of knobs for the kitchen cabinets becomes a touchy topic.
It so happens that happily down-to-earth Earl favors the pricier version. Nevertheless, despite his attitude towards those, she and he differ dramatically over any plan to dismiss a community in which they both were born and grew up to become the accomplished adults they are.
Their differences are at Ijames’s core and are illustrative of the questions posed and left with no convincingly reasonable solutions. Earl looks at his tough past as conducive not just to acceptable living, but as positive in the long run. For him, it’s what a community should and must be, not a large patch of land to be demolished and replaced with a personality-less environment that turns its back on longtime residents in favor of newcomers with no meaningful communal loyalty.
Aisha—even conceding she might just as well have reached a worthy level had she stayed in her birth surroundings—has an entirely different attitude towards her past. More than once, she defiantly wields a three-feet-square, three-dimensional plan of the revamped area. In one moment of barely contained fury, she points to sites where, as a teenager, she was menaced.
There it is. Ijames neatly establishes that individual experiences irrevocably affect our reactions to shared events. He demonstrates that even as the difference between Travis’ financially comfy past is likely never to ease completely Aisha’s approach to family expenses, Aisha’s recollections are unlikely to mesh conclusively with Earl’s.
Looking at the abiding trend towards gentrification nationally—including, of course, its currently political implications—Ijames breaks the news in a powerful play that surprisingly revives the sophistication of, say, something as removed as a 1920s Philip Barry comedy. It unfolds in a townhouse not unlike the mansion described in his Holiday. The high-walled, monotone grey Maruti Evans set is instantly elegant, not that much of it is immediately revealed.
For the first several minutes, the audience watches the action through cloudy plastic curtains, the initial impression being that they’re there as a metaphor for a distance from which Ijames wants the characters observed. Yes, to some extent he wants that, but literally he’s exposing the progress made on the materializing home when those fourth-wall curtains are pulled down, as are more curtains masking the rest of the tantalizing living room/kitchen that eventually emerges.
As sophisticated as the Ijames play is, that’s how sophisticated is the acting, under Saheem Ali’s entirely sure direction and the comparably sophisticated Barbara Samuels lighting. That includes Téa Guarino’s lively turn as Earl’s accomplished sister and Aisha’s sorority sister. Luckily for patrons, the two are ready to run through a fast-paced sorority house drill.
At the end of the day, of these charged days, Ijames presents his own almost too timely gentrification drill, and while insightfully presenting no phony conclusions, does present, believe it or not, a rich boulevard comedy about and of today. Cheers.
Good Bones opened October 1, 2024, at the Public Theater and runs through October 27. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
