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Summary
Summary
"As tough as it is tender, and shot through with aching authenticity, Good People is that rare play that is timeless and keyed into a specific moment of American life, without the need to grasp for topicality...Bringing the same clear-eyed emotional observation that distinguished his Pulitzer Prize-winner Rabbit Hole , Lindsay-Abaire has crafted another penetrating drama about deeply relatable issues." -David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
"Searing, superbly written...this is a well-made play, in the best sense of the term." -Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
"If Good People isn't a hit for Manhattan Theatre Club, there is no justice in the land. Lindsay-Abaire pays his respects to his old South Boston neighborhood with this tough and tender play about the insurmountable class divide between those who make it out of this blue-collar Irish neighborhood and those who find themselves left behind." -Marilyn Stasio, Variety
"Substantial, tender yet often howlingly funny...delectably uncomfortable to sit through. I'd call it a smart, painful social comedy with a head and a heart." -Dominic Maxwell, The Times (UK)
With his signature humor, Lindsay-Abaire explores the struggles, shifting loyalties and unshakeable hopes that come with having next to nothing in America. Set in Boston's Southie neighborhood, where a night on the town means a few rounds of bingo, where this month's paycheck covers last month's bills, we meet Margaret Walsh, who is facing eviction and scrambling to catch a break. When a friend from the old neighborhood, who is now very successful, moves back to town, Margaret hopes he may be the ticket to turning her life around.
David Lindsay-Abaire is the Pulitzer-winning author of Rabbit Hole , which was made into a feature film. He is the author of Good People , Fuddy Meers , Wonder of the World , A Devil Inside and Kimberly Akimbo , as well as the book and lyrics to Shrek the Musical . He has written the screenplays for Rabbit Hole , Rise of the Guardians and Oz: The Great and Powerful . Born in South Boston, he now lives in Brooklyn.
Author Notes
David Lindsay-Abaire is the Pulitzer-winning author of Rabbit Hole , which was made into a feature film. He is the author of Good People , Fuddy Meers , Wonder of the World , A Devil Inside and Kimberly Akimbo , as well as the book and lyrics to Shrek the Musical . He has written the screenplays for Rabbit Hole , Rise of the Guardians and Oz: The Great and Powerful . Born in South Boston, he now lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Personalities ranging from the amusingly neurotic to the borderline psychotic shape the 20 quirky stories in this collection. The tales are mostly narrated in the first person, and each is a rambling monologue whose speaker brings personal memories, idiosyncratic insights, and freely associated observations to bear on events. "Family of Man on Isle of Wight" is a seven-page run-on sentence whose narrator struggles with his own lack of focus to connect with a listener. In "Goodnight Maybe Forever," a man planning to commit suicide wallows in memories of his dysfunctional relationship with his mother and the habitual beatings he endured by virtually everyone he's ever known. "A Regular Day for Real People" is narrated over the course of a tennis match by a player who confesses to his opponent that he has kidnapped her brother in order to extort sexual favors from her. Although the characters in these stories are off-putting, they draw the reader into their slough of self-absorption through their bizarre behavior and occasional outrageous remarks: for example, how is it possible not to read a story all the way through if it begins, "There's more than one reason I tied you to that bedpost"? Lopez (Asunder) shows uncommon skill at evoking both laughs and shudders, sometimes in the same story. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A bleak, relentless collection of short stories from Lopez (Asunder, 2010, etc.). Are you a good person or a bad person? Don't ask Lopez: the "good people" in this collection are misogynists, abusers, victims, narcissists, and depressives. Not a lot of faith in humanity here. "Everything is always going to hell," one character says. Another narratortrying to comprehend and care about the death of his neighbor's sonsays, "I want to say that anyone can seem like a good person, that everyone in this neighborhood seems like a good person, but that certainly can't be the case." Another narrator, contemplating suicide, confesses, "I almost never prepare a meal for myself as I am not worth the bother most of the time." The humor, when it comes, is darkas in "Essentials," which consists entirely of a narrator telling you what he won't tell you. Is all life sadness and absence then? Few of these formally inventive, first-person stories gather much tension in a conventional sense. Instead, Lopez picks a subject (defenestration or massages or suicide or the movie Margaret) and circles it, his sentences like particles in a cyclic accelerator; the reader waits, nervously, for collision. "Remember to have a vision," Lopez writes in the imperative-based last story, "How to Direct a Major Motion Picture," and he certainly has a vision: this story collection is a comprehensive mosaic of misery. Read it in one sitting and you'll feel out of breath. Is it exhausting? Yes, but that's the point: you don't read a book like this for variety. Instead, you read it to stumble into the sunlight afterward, trying to convince yourself you're a good person, but man oh man, you're not so sure. Depressing, inventive, and marvelousa thought-provoking path to feeling awful. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Upon the release of Lopez's first novel, Part of the World (2007), experimental prose stylist Blake Butler described the narrator as a fascinating, isolated man, landlocked from any normal social world. The same can be said of the storytellers in this new collection of tightly knit short fiction, 20 stories that blend the obsessive's attention to minuscule detail with the amnesiac's affinity for flighty imprecision. The Problem with Green Bananas begins with an offhand remark, She said she couldn't because her week was bananas, that prompts a torrential tangent riddled with daddy issues and odd insecurities, only to conclude with another clichéd phrase, And you'd better believe it, sister. Lopez is a master of the Ouroboros-like loop, as in the brilliant two-pager, Now I Am Doubled Over, which enacts the bodily trauma contained in the title through visceral imagery and linguistic repetition, all but eating the narrator alive. Lopez has been compared to Beckett, Salinger, and Hemingway, and his contemporaries include the likes of Jac Jemc and Rey Andújar. Recommended for lovers of darkly humorous, strangely illuminating fiction.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2016 Booklist
