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Playwright’s Got The “Goods”

by Charles Gershman | Feb 15, 2012 3:18 pm

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Posted to: Arts

Certain facets of Christina Anderson’s new play Good Goods, which opened for previews Feb. 3 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, are hard to pin down. The setting is definitively a general store-cum-house in a largely black town in the American South, but the time is described as “1961 and 1994. And everything in between. Time is layered, stacked, mixed, and matched.” Similarly, the place is described as “a small town/village that doesn’t appear on any map. You have to know about it to get to it.” The intentional vagueness with which Anderson constructs time and place creates a sense of overlap and borderlessness that runs through the piece: there’s overlap between periods of time, and between places that, layered and stacked as they are, lack the form conventionally imposed by geographical boundaries. Time and place are, in essence, queered.

The play opens with Stacey’s return to his father’s store, Good Goods, which Truth (Marc Damon Johnson) has devotedly managed ever since Stacey’s father quit town. Stacey (Clifton Duncan) is half of a popular traveling comedy duo. Patty (De’Adre Aziza) is his steady both onstage and off—until, that is, he leaves her and returns home to the store, where Wire (Kyle Beltran), Patty’s twin brother and an effervescent messenger-about-town, has long awaited Stacey. It’s Stacey’s return to the store—and to Wire—that sets this lively phantasmagoria in motion.

Thankfully, due to a colorfully drawn script and a cadre of larger-than-life characters who continually challenge themselves and each other, that motion never stops.

Good Goods is a character-driven play with a clear set of strengths and few discernable flaws. Among its delights are its language—richly sonorous, a rhythmic feast of words and sounds and, occasionally, song. Traditional gender identities are stretched and melded: we have a man with a woman’s name, a woman inhabited briefly by the spirit of a man, and another man whose powers are greatest when possessed by the spirit of a woman. Love is a driving force, allowing bygone relationships to dissolve and bold new ones to form in their place. The play’s cumulative effect is not only refreshing, it is relieving. Anderson has allowed nothing to box her in: not the limits inflicted by time and place, not the impositions of established social conventions or traditional gender roles, not the confines of realism.

Drama Desk nominee Tina Landau’s direction is superb, coaxing crisp performances from a talented cast. (A longtime ensemble member of Chicago’s acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Landau’s celebrated productions include Charles Mee’s Orestes 2.0, staged in 1992 on an abandoned pier on the Hudson River in New York City, and the Tony-nominated 2001 Broadway revival of Bells Are Ringing, among many others.) Aziza’s and Angela Lewis’s performances are particularly strong: Aziza gracefully assumes the sultry allure that makes Patty at once sexy and sketchy, and the energetic Lewis (as Sunny, Patty’s mostly-female suitor) triumphs in a moment of surreal spirit possession that Anderson has effortlessly woven into this new world.

American Theatre magazine named Anderson, a 2011 graduate of the Yale School of Drama’s playwriting department, one of fifteen rising artists “whose work will be transforming America’s stages for decades to come.” It’s completely plausible: despite the dark shadows of history that linger in the wings, the fantastical world she’s stitched together is so brightly inventive, and so cheerily unshackled, that one wants to find a way to get there. If there’s more where Good Goods came from, we’ll have reason to rejoice.

Good Goods is running at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 25.

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