Yale Rep’s released the cast and details of Christina Anderson’s Good Goods, a play which blurs the natural and supernatural. The show plays Feb. 3-25 at 1120 Chapel Street.
Some of us were lucky to see the play when it was given an afternoon Yale School of Drama production, with a student cast, last year. Anderson was in the playwriting program at the time. Her contribution to the YSD’s Carlotta Festival of New Plays last spring was Blacktop Sky, about strangers who meet in the courtyard of an urban housing project.
Good Goods is a different kettle of fish. It has a fairly large cast (six), and deals with complex issues of bonding and escaping, mentally and physically. The title comes from the name of a nondescript storefront in a Southern town.
For this latest new work in a season burstin’ with ‘em, Yale Rep has enticed Tina Landau, a 1984 Yale grad and a prominent director of significant new plays for decades. Though she’s worked elsewhere in town recently, directing Paula Vogel’s A Civil War Christmas for the Long Wharf Theatre, and did a major production of Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s Brother/Sister plays at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, where Landau has been a company member since 1997.
Like their director, every member of the Good Goods cast is making their Yale Rep debuts with this show. That doesn’t mean that a few degrees of separation from Connecticut theaters aren’t evident:
De’adre Aziza, who plays Patricia in Good Goods, was in the Broadway and Public Theater productions of Passing Strange, directed by Yale alum Annie Dorsen.
Kyle Beltran (who plays Wire) was in the first national tour of In the Heights, a show which originated at Wesleyan University.
Marc Damon Johnson (who plays Truth) was in the Long Wharf reworking of the Strouse/Adams/Gibson/Odets musical Golden Boy over a decade ago.
Angela Lewis (Sunny) was in a different Christina Anderson play, the one-act Inked Baby, at Playwrights Horizons in 2009.
Oberon K.A. Adjepong (Factory Folk, Waymon as Hunter Priestess) was in several regional productions of Ruined, by Yale grad Lynn Nottage.
Clifton Duncan (Stacey) was in the workshop of the new musical Clear (co-written by Passing Strange’s Stew) at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Wallingford in 2010.
James Schuette, who designed the sets for A Civil War Christmas, The Brother/Sister Plays and two dozen other Tina Landau productions, gets to do this one too. Good Goods’ lighting designer, Scott Zielinski, and costume designer Toni-Leslie James also worked on that Long Wharf premiere of A Civil War Christmas. Sound designer Junghoon Pi, who’s in his third year as a student at the School of Drama, is the guy who blended the hip-hop and blues so deliriously for James Bundy’s revival of The Piano Lesson at Yale Rep last season. The Rep’s Literary Manager Amy Boratko is Good Goods’ Production Dramaturg, as she was on so many recent Rep world premieres. The production’s other dramaturg is YSD student Alexandra Ripp, the current managing editor of Theater magazine who recently dramaturged the Rep premiere of Belleville.
Playwright Christina Anderson.