Theater Review by Carol Rocamora . . .
Ghosts can be scary. Ghosts can be troublemakers. Ghosts can be destructive. Witness the ones in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Ibsen’s Ghosts, or Brendon Jacobs Jenkins’ Appropriate, or James Ijames’s Fat Ham.
But that last author (Ijames) now has second thoughts about ghosts. Yes, they are emissaries from the past, but what if they are returning to remind us of the good there was, calling upon us to bring them forward into the present for the sake of a better future?
In Good Bones, Ijames’s soulful new work now playing at the Public Theater, ghosts play the leading roles . . . though we can’t see them. But we can hear them. So can Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), who has bought a beautiful new townhouse in an unnamed city (think Philadelphia, where the playwright comes from), in an area that was once her home. Called Durham Park, it was a poor, black, working-class community where Aisha grew up with her single mother (who worked as a housecleaner) and where she was afraid to walk the streets at night. But now she has a new job—as an advocate for the new sports complex coming into Durham—and she’s returned with her husband Travis to help build a new identity for the community.
The entitled Travis, from a wealthy black family, has a sense of optimism and possibility—he’s bought a local restaurant that he plans to turn into a gourmet haven. So, like Aisha, he’s invested professionally in the neighborhood’s future. Hence, their decision to renovate their new home as a model of gentrification. “Cities must change,” says Aisha, “leaving the past behind.”
But Earl (Khris Davis), a local contractor whom they’ve hired to do the renovations, has a different view. Like Aisha, Earl and his sister Carmen (Tea Guarino) grew up in the same projects as Aisha, inhabited by working-class blacks. Though his sister is upwardly mobile (she’s a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with professional ambitions), Earl clings to the values of the old neighborhood, where shared rituals (like block parties, which he organizes) foster a sense of community and caring. These values, he fears, will be destroyed by the new sports complex, which he opposes. “You’re putting my people out of homes,” Earl protests to Aisha. Perhaps that’s why he insists that Aisha and Travis invest in the finest knobs for their cabinets and doors. It’s the least he can do to express his pride in the house he’s renovating, which, he reminds Aisha, used to belong to Sister Berniece, the first black woman on the City Council. Indeed, after she died, Earl and Carmen used to play in the house’s empty rooms as children. “The bones of this house are good,” he says, “but the past haunts us every day.”
Though friendly toward one another, Travis and Earl are essentially polar opposites, each entrenched in their respective positions of entitlement and tradition. Aisha, however, is conflicted. She emphatically states that “you determine who you are—not the place you grew up in.” At the same time, it is only Aisha who hears those ghosts, representing her ambivalence over returning to her old neighborhood and feeling the conflict it’s provoking in her.
The stagecraft with which these ghosts are represented is wonderful, and at the same time subtle. When you walk into the theater you see, instead of a curtain, sheets of transparent plastic that partially obscure a clear view of Maruti Evans’s set. As the play begins, you see a woman lurking behind them—a kind of ghost, herself. That turns out to be Aisha. From that moment on, you feel an ominous sense of what’s to come. One by one, Earl tears these sheets down as he continues his renovations, until a beautiful new dining room and kitchen are revealed. But whenever he leaves and Aisha is alone on stage, we hear sounds: whispers, laughter, etc., from ghosts of the old neighborhood who haunt the house (the effects are by Fan Zhang). At one point, in the semi-darkness between scenes, the upstage wall is awash with red. At another point, the glass doors to the garden blow open. At yet another (the creepiest moment), a ball suddenly bounces down the stairs —though no one from the second floor appears to retrieve it.
Carmen is the character who tries to bridge the widening gap between Aisha and Earl. She and Aisha both discover that they were cheerleaders at the same high school and break out in a delightful dance together. It’s Ijames’s way of showing that, with a shared heritage, there is a foundation upon which to build, forging the past with the present and future. Now the characters must struggle to find a way.
Travis attempts to find a “way.” He invites Earl and Carmen to dinner to try his barbecued gourmet goat (Earl likes goat). All goes well until a conflict inevitably erupts. Earl insists that Aisha tell the community that it won’t exist any more, and that they will be displaced. “Just imagine having a neighborhood turn into a home,” he pleads, hoping to change her perspective. But to no avail. After Earl and Carmen leave, Aisha breaks down, lamenting: “I have no place I belong . . . ”
Directed by Saheem Ali with skill and subtlety, each cast member elicits our empathy. Susan Kelechi Watson plays the conflicted Aisha with vulnerability and depth. Together with her husband Travis, played by Mamoudou Athie, they generate a portrait of a struggling couple who genuinely love each other, despite their different points of view. As Carmen, the lovely young Tea Guarino represents the character with the greatest ability to incorporate the best of the past into the promise of a shared, bright future. As Earl, Khris Davis meets the challenges of the role as the defender of the past with passion and conviction (and plenty of charm, too).
Ultimately, this provocative, thoughtful new work is about those unseen ghosts, subtle but ever-present. They call to mind others who appear in contemporary plays, like the ghost in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1987), the guardian of the family’s heritage (the piano), and therefore similar in purpose to Ijames’s ghost.
Most contemporary plays about changing communities focus on issues pertaining to integration, like Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and its sequel, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010) (which also has a ghost). But Good Bones provides a new, urgent perspective—about the internal conflict between blacks of different classes, education, and professional status—and how that conflict threatens urban communities of the future.
As Ijames shows us, we’re a changing society that is haunted. But rather than fear our ghosts, let’s tear down those curtains that cloud our vision (like the ones at the top of the play), turn on the lights, face them, and invite them to join us, as we move, inexorably, into the future.
Good Bones. Through October 27 at The Public Theater (425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place). www.publictheater.org
Photos: Joan Marcus
