Good People
Tonight I went to see Good People with a couple of friends. I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it, at least not in the usual sense. I suppose because I associate enjoyment with pleasure and a pleasurable experience it wasn’t—I sat squirming in my seat for most of it. However, this is what made it great. It is a great play. It is a play about real life, about being human. It was the kind of play, as my friend Keith Raniere would say, “haunts” you. It gets under your skin and reminds you—helps you feel—what it is to be human. It is simple, complex, intense, tragic, poetic and beautiful all at once. The subject matter is—if you look at it from a superficial perspective—simple. But, just like all things human, when you scratch beneath the surface and expose the delicate psycho-dynamic and the struggle of each character, it is infinitely rich and complex.
The acting was superb. Each character was well developed and convincing. None of them were likable, all of them lovable. There was no happy ending; it was tragic from start to finish. But, as with any great tragedy – think most simply of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and so on – inextricably woven within the tragedy is beauty and poetry. I’m not sure what the play was about for anyone else, but what unfolded to me were the ethics and character of Margie Walsh (Frances McDormand) and the people who affected and were affected by her.
Perhaps it showed a darker side of people than we—or I—like to look at. Margie Walsh is no Mary Poppins, no Portia, not even an Elphaba, but she is a hero. She’s an everyday hero, doing her best to do what she thinks is good; doing her best to survive. Good People isn’t the kind of play you walk out of feeling inspired or hopeful for whom you could be or what might be possible. It’s the kind of play, at least for me, you walk out of feeling how your life has been and how things are now: tragic, beautiful and poetic. Not only did I walk out with a deeper understanding of my self, my life and my choices, I left with a deeper sense of the common thread that binds us no matter who we are, where we are from or what choices we make—the common thread of humanity. I love art like this, and I highly recommend you see Good People if you do too.
