The last half hour of David Lindsay-Abaire’s new drama, Good People, suggests that he may yet become a great playwright. I know, I know, Lindsay-Abaire won the 2007 Pulitzer for Rabbit Hole, so he’s already got the American theater’s most prestigious indicator of greatness. But that Pulitzer came as the result of a kind of backroom maneuver: deadlocked on the three nominated finalists, the drama committee voted to consider a play that hadn’t made the cut, and that play was Rabbit Hole. More to the point, Rabbit Hole is dreadful—two long acts of people processing their precious feelings, all to demonstrate that when your four-year-old is killed in a freak accident it’s really hard to get your life back to normal. It’s more a staged position paper than a drama.
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But at least the playwright made an effort to write something that might matter. His earlier scripts—typified by inexplicable successes like Kimberly Akimbo and Fuddy Meers—are cloying, unrelentingly quirky attempts at darkish comedy whose circular, semiclever shenanigans always prevent things from getting too serious. Or too coherent, for that matter. So perhaps I should thank the Pulitzer board for nudging Lindsay-Abaire in the right direction.
But then the staged-position-paper doldrums settle in. Lindsay-Abaire’s thesis is that it’s hard to catch a break in a shitty economy when you’re an unemployed high school dropout saddled with a special-needs daughter and no family support system. He therefore has Margie hang out in the kitchen with her two girlfriends, Dottie and Jean, where they talk a lot about how hard it is to find a job. Then Margie pays a surprise visit to Mike, the boyfriend she hasn’t seen in 30 years, who made it out of “Southie” to become a successful physician. She asks him for a job; a conversation full of awkwardness and mutual condescension ensues (she looks down on him for turning his back on the old neighborhood, he looks down on her not working her way out). Then Margie and the girls play bingo and talk a lot more about how hard it is to find a job.
Through 11/11: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Wed 10/24-11/7, 2 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Downstairs Theater, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$86.
