Good Bones, 27 September 2024

Good Bones is a deeply provocative exploration of gentrification told through the eyes of a spirited woman who made it out of a dangerous neighborhood and came back to fix it, and an enthusiastic contractor who never left the neighborhood but deeply believes in the power of the community that lives there. Add in the woman’s born-into-money husband and the contractor’s progressive, Ivy-League-ambitious sister, and the audience is in for a wild ride through change and the importance of how change happens.

The couple moving back into Dunbar is deeply disconnected from each other. The director (Saheem Ali) and design team made bold choices that highlighted the stark contrast between them. From the beginning, they seemed to belong in separate worlds. Their outfits clashed (costume design: Oana Botez). Their conversations were forced. They were awake at different times. They seldom shared the stage for more than a few minutes without running off. This dysfunctional relationship centered on making decisions about designing their kitchen. The husband, Travis (Mamoudou Athie), is the primary cook in the family who would spend a lot of his life in that kitchen, but the wife, Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson) wanted to overrule his preferences to save money and get the job done within their budget. This was symbolic of what happens when outsiders, like the wife’s employer, come to an already existing neighborhood (Dunbar) and want to tear it down to build something that they sincerely believe will be better (the sports complex) with the knowledge that their lives won’t be directly impacted by the process or the results. The contractor, Earl (Khris Davis), represented those whose lives would be directly impacted by removal of businesses and hundreds of people living in housing projects whose homes would be demolished. While Earl and Aisha shared traumatic pasts in the projects and both developed remarkable resilience, Earl’s primary desire was to acknowledge and preserve the places where he had good memories while Aisha wanted to build better places and wanted to think about a better world without fully acknowledging what it would mean to replace (read: displace) this one.

Aisha’s future-oriented attitude was continually disturbed by memories of the past, created with light (Barbara Samuels), sound (Fan Zheng), and scenic shifts (Maruti Evans). These disturbances did not belong in her world, and she sought to get rid of them in the same way that she sought to get rid of the housing projects of her past. Earl, on the other hand, spoke of these same moments as the past reaching into the present to tell him something. He tried very hard to communicate the value in these moments to Aisha, both literally and metaphorically when he spoke of the importance of the sturdy walls that created a home for him that kept him safe.

I deeply appreciated how every layer of James Ijames’s carefully crafted script reinforced the same story and ideas. There were no wasted words or filler scenes— even in comedic moments that alleviated some of the tension. Each interaction was another way of exploring the question of how change can happen, who decides changes are needed, who gets to make changes, and who is an afterthought in the decision making process. Travis was an afterthought in his marriage and by the time he was able to express how much he hated the changes in his life, he was locked into owning a restaurant and a house in Dunbar that he’d just paid to renovate in the hopes that Aisha would like the final product even though the details of the kitchen weren’t really part of her life (further evidenced by her takeout containers when she attempted to feed Travis dinner). By the time he was able to stand up and articulate that the changes were bad for him, they were irreversible, like tearing down housing projects to build a sports arena. Aisha was so wrapped up in her traumatic feelings about motherhood and work that she didn’t notice her husband’s pain. She expected him to be fine through it all, as she expected the displaced residents of Dunbar to be fine through the demolition of their homes. For Aisha, it was about the product, not the process.

The fourth character in this play was Earl’s sister, Carmen (Tea Guarino). Despite having the least stage time, she brought a critical perspective to the already evolving dialogue. Carmen was attending an Ivy League university outside of Dunbar, and the changes in her personality (being vegetarian, dating a partner who used “they/them” pronouns, envisioning a future beyond Dunbar) were all acceptable to Earl without question or any kind of agonizing thought processing. Why? It wasn’t just because Carmen was his family. Carmen still respected and understood where she had come from. She enjoyed the haunted aspects of the house and its familiarity to the past. She deleted Travis’s neighbor reporting app and advocated for the merits of the neighborhood with Aisha and Travis. Carmen was able to temporarily heal the anger between Earl and Aisha by connecting with both of them and having a foot in both worlds and listening before pushing a perspective. Ijames’s primary argument in the show was embodied in Carmen— change can be good when you go about it with reverence for the past, mutual respect for your present, and hope for your future.

I attended this performance on a press pass from The Public Theater Press Team.