2011 Tony Award Nominee for Best Play
By David Lindsay-Abaire
January 29, 2013– February 17, 2013
All of us are “good people.” But how do we stay that way when faced with the challenges of every day life? One of the gifts of live theatre is that it allows us to reflect on our own lives as we get a glimpse into the lives of others.
Nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Play, Good People presents us with a riotous and contemplative mix of characters and situations that asks us to consider the dangerous consequence of holding onto the past versus leaving it behind. This deeply human and beautifully written play is sure to have you talking to your friends and family well after you leave the theatre—and isn’t that theatre at its best?
“The play came about really because of three separate but persistent things I couldn’t get out of my head – a lack of new American plays about class, my old neighborhood of Southie – a very working class, hardscrabble, section of Boston’s inner city – and my experiences as a poor kid attending prep school. Class is something I know about. I’ve lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity but I didn’t want to be didactic about class. We have this myth that if you work hard, you can accomplish anything. It’s not a very American thing to say, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s true for a lot of people, but you need other things to succeed. You need luck, you need opportunity, and you need the life skills to recognize what an opportunity is.
I knew that if I DID decide to write about the old neighborhood, then class would inevitably bubble to the surface because it was so inherently present in the fabric of the community. And I thought if I could tap into my own experiences and memories that came out of attending that prep school, then maybe I could dramatize the topic in a way that reflected my own complicated feelings and struggles with it. So with all those ingredients stewing in the pot, I started to write.
And out came Good People.”
— David Lindsay-Abaire, playwright
Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire talk about how he took the threads of his working-class South Boston roots and spun them into Good People, Tony-nominated for Best Play. Video courtesy of Playbill.com.
An interview with the playwright, David Lindsay-Abaire, and the original creative team that originally produced the play at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2011. Video courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club.
“The play came about really because of three separate but persistent things I couldn’t get out of my head – a lack of new American plays about class, my old neighborhood of Southie – a very working class, hardscrabble, section of Boston’s inner city – and my experiences as a poor kid attending prep school. Class is something I know about. I’ve lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity but I didn’t want to be didactic about class. We have this myth that if you work hard, you can accomplish anything. It’s not a very American thing to say, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s true for a lot of people, but you need other things to succeed. You need luck, you need opportunity, and you need the life skills to recognize what an opportunity is.