Theater review by Raven Snook
Memories of the past and fears of a precarious future haunt an urban community in James Ijames's Good Bones. Set in an area undergoing a seismic transformation, the drama unfolds in a townhouse kitchen that a proud local contractor, Earl (a disarming Khris Davis), is renovating for a moneyed married couple: Travis (Mamoudou Athie), a restaurateur, and Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), who was raised nearby and now represents a controversial stadium project that promises to revitalize the neighborhood. Fan Zhang's superb sound design gives a sense of the vibrant lives beyond Aisha and Travis's door, which keeps opening on its own—one of a series of small, supernatural reminders that history is embedded in their walls.
Aisha and Travis are trying to conceive a child, but they are also having trouble connecting. Her chemistry with Earl feels at once dangerous and inevitable. But their flirtation soon turns into something more like an interrogation. Aisha thinks Earl is romanticizing a district that she recalls as violent and oppressive; Earl is shocked that Aisha supports displacement and destruction. How could she be so tone-deaf?
Good Bones | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
The audience may wonder that, too. Despite Watson's valiant efforts, Alicia too often feels like a political position, not a person. She has literally forgotten where she came from, and Earl is constantly reminding her of details it's hard to believe she lost—like the nickname of the housing project they both grew up in, or the fact that her new home previously belonged to the first Black woman on the city council.
Good Bones is very different in tone from Ijames's Pulitzer Prize-winning Fat Ham, but the two plays have several themes in common, including generational trauma, conflicting values and ever-present ghosts; exploring these questions from a socioeconomic perspective, not a racial one, shifts the stakes in interesting ways. (Even Earl is complicit in the changes to his community.) Director Saheem Ali, incisive as always, does what he can to animate Ijames’s contemplations of class, code-switching and the corrosive effects of gentrification, and the result is mostly engaging if not always convincing. There may be a great play inside Good Bones, but it needs a bit more fleshing out.
Good Bones. Public Theater (Off Broadway). By James Ijames. Directed by Saheem Ali. With Susan Kelechi Watson, Khris Davis, Mamoudou Athie, Téa Guarino. Running time: 1hr 45mins. No intermission.
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Good Bones | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
