Clifton Duncan, Angela Lewis, de'Adre Aziza, and Marc Damon Johnson in Tina Landau's production of Good Goods at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 25. Photo © Joan Marcus, 2012.
Through Feb. 25 at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
By Christina Anderson. Directed by Tina Landau. Scenic Designer: James Schuette. Costume designer: Toni-Leslie James. Lighting Designer: Scott Zielinski. Sound Designer: Junghoon Pi. Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko, Alexandra Ripp. Vocal and Dialect Coach: Jane Guyer Fujita. Fight Director: Rick Sordelet. Stage Manager: Maria Cantin.
We’ve got ourselves a trend here. Surely we’ve got ourselves a new American theater trend:
Haunted stages.
An acceptance of the supernatural. Dark suspenseful underpinnings to relationship dramas.
That sense of forboding and doom applied to standard theater subjects such as feuding families and coming-of-age adventures can be found in a slew of recent productions on regional stages, including the Yale Rep’s own premieres of Belleville and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Bossa Nova. You could also apply this idea of eerie environmental gloom and film-score suspense chords to the Rep’s recent revivals of The Piano Lesson (which, like Good Goods, buys into the idea of real rather than metaphorical ghosts), A Delicate Balance, Autumn Sonata and Notes from Underground. There’s that despairing mood, those overwhelming sets, that sense of trapped isolation. The sense that it would take some sort of miracle, or more likely an unleashed demon, to take the characters out of their sorry existences.
Good Goods wears its traditional suspense-drama duds proudly. Its inventory consists of stock characters:
The buff, focused leading man (Clifton Duncan as Stacey, returnd to his hometown to tend his late father’s dry-goods store)
The good-natured sidekick (Marc Damon Johnson as Truth, shop assistant to Stace’s dad and now to Stace himself.)
The bitter, vivacious ex-girlfriend (De’adre Aziza as Patricia, eager to get Stace back on the road with her in their old comedy act)
The goofy younger brother (Kyle Beltran, endearing as the entrepreneurial yet wet-behind-the-ears Wire, younger brother of Sunny and confidante of everybody)
The stranger in this strange land (Angela Lewis as Sunny, a sweethearted girl escaping problems elsewhere and ingesting a few new ones)
…and, as they say on Gilligan’s Island, “the rest” (Oberon K.A. Adjepong in a succession of sudden appearances, establishing plot points but ultimately providing the show’s building-shaking climax.)
Tina Landau uses a multi-platform style, jumping the scenes from the sides to the center of the stage in a manner that comes off as filmic. Major plot points and exchanges don’t always happen center stage, and scenes are defined by tight locations. Anderson is complicit in this cinematic style by beginning her play with a character listening to a lengthy comedy routine on cassette player, the sort of audio opening which might unwind during the opening credits of a movie.
But this is a matter of directorial interpretation. This is not one of those plays which, but the way its written, imposes obstacles on those who must enliven it. The shifting scenes and set-pieces within set-pieces is a style for which Tina Landau is known, and which she also used when staging the world premiere of Paula Vogel’s A Civil War Christmas at the Long Wharf Theatre a few years ago.
Anderson’s scenes can flow more naturally. There’s been a choice here to isolate them. For one thing, it heightens the suspense in a show which is unabashedly, admirably I think, melodramatic.
Angela Lewis and Clifton Duncan in one of the sunnier, good-times scenes in Good Goods at the Yale Rep. Photo by Joan Marcus.
Christina Anderson has been hailed a fine new voice, and here’s why: her plays have ideas, her characters are articulate, but it’s not all talk. Anderson’s work—whether as elaborate as this one or as sparse as Blacktop Sky, her contribution to the Carlotta Festival last year when she was still a student at the Yale School of Drama—demands movement. It demands action.
Here, it also demands the sort of suspension of disbelief, the theatrical wonderment, which has gone out of a lot of contemporary playwriting. Inspired by a class exercise (one of Paula Vogel’s famed bake-offs) to write around the theme of “possession,” Anderson has created a gothic horror context in which to explore issues she likes to explore anyway—awkward, tentative connections between people who are different stages of their lives. Here’s it’s a young woman running away from a marriage, thrust into the fall-out from several longterm relationship, whether of the romantic or the familial sort. The open-eyed astonishment of the young woman is contrasted by jaded, longsuffering commentary among the others.
Here’s one such bringdown: “I know you live and breathe ulterior motives.” Here’s another: “You act like having a history with somebody gives you a right to hold on to ‘em.”
History is an elusive concept in this play, which is more concerned with detritus than progress. The program notes suggest that Good Goods takes place in “1961 and 1994. And everything in between. Time is layered, stacked, mixed and matched.” And it happens in “A small town/village that doesn’t appear on any map. You have to know about it to get to it. And even then you have to have to know somebody who’s from there to survive.” If that set-up seems overwritten, it’s not played that way, like some Twilight Zone void. It’s just an environment unmarked by pop culture references and the latest snazzy brandnames. It’s one of those forgotten towns way off the highway, where restless spirits must settle and simmer.
Such possessive spirits persist in this play through tense work relationships,tenser love relationships, broken family relationships and ultimately in an intense no-fooling spiritual possession brought on by an industrial accident, itself already an illustration of the old “owe my soul to company store” manner of capitalist possession.
Possession, as posited in Good Goods at the Yale Rep. Photo by Joan Marcus.
There are references among the residents of this backwater town to “The Invasion,” and such eerie comments punctuate Good Goods like spell-casting oaths. The title itself comes from a dry goods store which seems lost in time: there’s nothing to say it doesn’t exist in the present-day (in a culture that can’t afford electronic devices or is served by a newspaper), yet the products which line the shelves of Good Goods are timeless in the old-fashioned sense: Gold Bond Medicated Foot Powder, Rinso detergent, Bang bathroom cleaner, Flash Hand Cleaner…
These usefully disorienting details in scenic designer James Schuette’s counter nicely with lighting designer Scott Zielinski, costume designer designer Toni-Leslie James and director Landau’s wise decision not to exhibit a similar level of heightened reality when it comes to special effects. There is voodoo practiced in this play. There is spiritual possession and transmigration. There is blood and shock. But, especially for a school which prides itself on cutting-edge stage technology and has recently launched a program in stage projections, the underplaying of those tools here is profound. Landau may move the action around so that it occasionally undercuts momentum, but she (and the entire creative team) never forsakes the humanity and accessibility of these forlorn characters. Instead of state-of-the-art whirlwinds and ghostly intrusions, we get good old-fashioned red lights and smoke machines and sweeping hand gestures, which is just as it should be here.
Likewise, Anderson, piles on comedy routines and transparent metaphor and allegories—my favorite funny concept has nearly everybody onstage clad in shirts borrowed from the show’s most stable character, the upstanding Stacey (Clifton Duncan)—but none of those routines, or the many plot contrivances, take away from the sincere human moments she wants to explore.
The fight scenes, and the staging in general, seems willfully over the top, yet those choreographed tableaux serve to highlight, rather than wash away, the more intimate scenes. Why this doesn’t come off as an anarchic mishmash of dirty deeds and good clean melodramatic fun is simply a testament to Anderson’s fluid and flexible writing, and the effectively emotive playing of the six-person cast. Most of the characters are larger than life: entertainers by trade, or aggressively social, or flirty, or outgoing, or wide-eyed with innocence, or trying to control a rampant evil demon. But Anderson provides soft centers, and the actors dwell in them.
So you can buy into Good Goods on numerous levels—as a relationship drama, as a tale of maturity, as a leaving-home odyssey, as a microcosmic metaphor for sweeping social change around the world, as a classroom exercise on the theme of possession, or as a pleasantly alarming evening of flash and fury, too entertaining to be too disturbing.
You can’t discount that Good Goods uses classic banter and presentational tricks to sell its goods, including some methods that went out with buggy whips. But you also deny it’s got stuff worth selling.