COMPELLING, FUNNY SOUTHIE STORY BY LOCAL PULITZER PRIZE WINNER COMES HOME TO BOSTON TO BEGIN HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY’S 31ST SEASON
(BOSTON) – Good People, Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston native David Lindsay-Abaire’s humor-filled Broadway hit about identity, fate, and class, comes home to Boston to open the Huntington Theatre Company’s 31st season. Nationally renowned Kate Whoriskey (Ruined and How I Learned to Drive Off Broadway) directs the Huntington’s production of the New York Drama Critic’s Circle award winner that features Johanna Day (God of Carnage and Carol Mulroney at the Huntington) as Margie Walsh.
The cast also includes local favorites Nancy E. Carroll (Brendan and Present Laughter at the Huntington) and South Boston native Karen MacDonald (All My Sons and Before I Leave You at the Huntington) – on stage together for the first time in their long and illustrious careers – as Margie’s Southie friends, as well as Michael Laurence (Desire Under the Elms on Broadway) as the high school boyfriend Margie tracks down in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
Called, “Enthralling and utterly gripping” by the Los Angeles Times, Good People takes place in South Boston where this month’s paycheck covers last month’s bills and bingo is a night on the town. Sharp-tongued single-mom Margie Walsh has just been let go from yet another job and is facing eviction. Scrambling to make ends meet for herself and her developmentally disabled adult daughter, she looks up an old flame – now a fertility doctor living in Chestnut Hill with his young wife – hoping he’ll help her make a fresh start. Lindsey-Abaire’s acclaimed drama explores how twists of fate determine our path. The Boston Globe says, “Good People maps the fault lines of social class with a rare acuity of perception while also packing a substantial emotional wallop.”
“David’s play explores complex social questions about class, luck, and escaping our roots with electric energy and sharp humor,” says Huntington Artistic Director Peter DuBois. “Our production marks a homecoming for him, Kate, and this local story.” Hear more from DuBois about Good People.
Good People paints a very different portrait than recent films and literature of the storied Boston neighborhood. Rather than gritty and crime-laden, as depicted in Good Will Hunting and The Departed, Good People’s image of South Boston is drawn from the neighborhood in which Lindsay-Abaire grew up – one populated by everyday people whose individual situations either held them in the neighborhood or offered them a path out. Lindsay-Abaire’s path out was forged in part by a scholarship from the local Boys and Girls Club to the prestigious Milton Academy. There, his gift for writing was nurtured, and he subsequently became a playwright, librettist, lyricist, and screenwriter.
“I spent many-a-summer with my dad selling fruit out of the back of his truck on a corner of Huntington Avenue right across the street from the Huntington,” recalls Lindsay-Abaire. “I would sell bags of plums to kids from BU and wonder what kinds of plays were performed inside. It was both thrilling and surreal to be inside that very theatre many years later, watching the Huntington’s wonderful production of my play Rabbit Hole.
“I’m excited to be back with Good People, especially since it’s very much about and inspired by my hometown. It’s about class in America. It’s about choices and luck, and lack of both. It’s about the good people sitting inside that building in plush theatre seats, and the equally good people selling fruit out on the corner. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather see this play performed.”