The GOOD BONES of a Great Gentrification Play — Review

A few P-words come to mind while seeing Good Bones, James Ijames’ latest play, which is having its excellent New York premiere at the Public Theatre, in a production directed by Saheem Ali.

Progress: What Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), who cultivates community partnerships for a real estate development company building an upscale sports complex in her native city, to which she’s just moved back, considers herself to be helping along.

Performance: Which her restaurateur husband, Travis (Mamoudou Athie), regards the upwardly mobile couple to be achieving at a peak.

Pride: As it alternatively beams and seethes off of Earl (Khris Davis), the homegrown contractor they’ve hired to do up their new house, whenever he feels either familial (he and Aisha grew up in the same projects) or defensive (he resents its possible change).

Presentation: What his college-aged sister Carmen (Téa Guarino) has mastered in order to move between her finance studies at UPenn and her humble upbringing.

Those are, of course, reductive, though the ways they apply to each character, as they themselves shift between different ones in flowing combinations, are endlessly expansive. And a few other words, beginning with different letters, are also brilliantly evoked: aspiration, recognition, success, ownership, expectation, nostalgia, growth, and self-reliance.

But the main ones Ijames keeps examining, and pitting together in a hellish helix of double consciousness, are Propriety and Property. Does Earl really love his often-inhospitable neighborhood, or is he just cornered into defending it when faced with its extinction? And are the costly door knobs he sells indicative of his own bougieness, or of his shrewd business skills?

He’s more than just a catalyst in Aisha and Travis’ newly relocated union, though. To call Good Bones a drama about gentrification would be to oversimplify its ambitions, which stretch from topical issues and larger displacement-era dialectics to an increasingly vivid study of a relationship occurring between two people born into and borne out of their circumstances.

Aisha sees Earl’s inability to sleep through a nearby block party as an irksome flaw from his pampered upbringing; he takes it as an attack on his masculinity. Earl thinks Aisha’s ambitious independence can curdle into antisocial behaviors; she learned early that it might be her only way to survive.

Carmen shows up some three-quarters of the way into the 110-minute production and her entry, though made instantly attractive by Guarino, sets up the play’s sole airless sequence: a dinner party held so the two families could mend the ideological hiccups which had come up during construction. The inevitable argument that takes place is exciting, but the waiting weighs down an otherwise remarkably well-paced work.

But with across-the-board stellar performances; a simple set (by Maruti Evans) that slowly unveils the house-in-progress; lighting (by Barbara Samuels) and sound (by Fan Zhang) that’s naturalistic, until it’s not –  as Aisha’s gnawing conscience begins to take shape; and an intelligent script, it’s only a minor stumble.

‍Good Bones is in performance through October 27, 2024 at the Public Theatre on Lafayette St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.