Theatre in Review: Good Bones (Public Theater)

	Susan Kelechi Watson, Khris Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus

Like the house where it takes place, Good Bones has plenty of curb appeal, but it's also a little bit unfinished. It looks good and is filled with attractive, talented people but its drama arrives surprisingly late in the evening. Playwright James Ijames, who has previously given us Kill Move Paradise, a strikingly stylized account of young Black men's deaths, and Fat Ham, a wild, contemporary, queer version of Hamlet, delivers his most conventional work yet. It's an issue-based drama with loads of exposition and carefully laid-out points of view, and it climaxes at a dinner party with conflict as the main dish. The playwright is conscientious about building his dramatic structure, almost too much so: Good Bones sometimes feels like it was created following a book of instructions.

We're inside a renovation project in an unnamed American city. The house's new owners, Aisha and Travis, are part of the area's gentrifying trend: He is a chef, opening a kind of haute-cuisine soul food restaurant with a menu that includes "tenderized chicken gristle with mustard green puree and caviar" plus "sweet potato pie foam" and "oxtail on cornbread toast." She works with sports franchises, to "help [them] speak the language of the community" when developing new stadium projects. They're young, stylish, and upwardly mobile.; it feels only too appropriate that they have moved into the former home of the late Sister Bernice, the "first Black woman on city council" and "one of those Black people who had money from way back."

Despite their good fortune, Aisha and Travis are tense and unhappy: Among other things, she resents his family wealth and close relations, he isn't thrilled about moving back to her hometown, and, in addition to redoing a house and starting a business, they're trying to conceive a child in their rare free time. (She doesn't appreciate his ovulation tracking phone app, which dictates them having sex at inopportune moments; indeed, she shuts it down ASAP.) And when she gets good news from her doctor, she keeps it to herself.

But marital disharmony is a sideshow to the main dramatic event, which pits Aisha against Earl, their uncommonly gifted contractor. Things get a little flirty when Earl learns that he and Aisha grew up in the same housing project and attended the same high school. A freeze sets in when he realizes that she is working to put over a massive redevelopment that will erase the city's storied Black neighborhood, tearing down public housing and shuttering long-running local businesses. In his view, Aisha is meticulous about respecting her new house's good bones, but she's willing to wipe out an entire community in the name of progress.

The major disappointment in Good Bones is how long it takes for the debate to be joined and how thin the arguments are: They boil down to him asserting the imperiled neighborhood is thriving, and her clapping back that it is a dangerous hellhole. (They had very different growing-up experiences, him in a strong, nurturing family and her with an unstable mother and a best friend who was murdered.) The play fails to offer a strong back-and-forth; Earl never offers a powerful positive vision of the district and Aisha is blind to the displacement her plan will cause. Then again, Earl has no real response to her claim that the project will create 6,000 jobs.

Before he gets down to business, Ijames introduces several plot danglers, some borrowed from other plays. He drops hints that the house is haunted -- a la August Wilson's The Piano Lesson -- but does nothing with them. (For that matter, the idea of a woman of color acting as a go-between between a Black neighborhood and a corporate entity recalls Itamar Moses' The Ally, staged at the Public last season.) A scene in which Travis reports being stopped by the police feels like a pro forma nod to current events, as does the thrown-away revelation that Earl's sister, Carmen, is dating a nonbinary person. The most interesting issue -- the neighborhood's fate -- too often gets crowded out by Aisha and Travis' dreary relationship problems. (Do they want a baby or not? You decide.)

Indeed, given their clashing temperaments, it's hard to understand what Aisha and Travis see in each other. She is patronizing, chilly, and almost parental with him, especially in a spat about splurging on expensive custom knobs for the kitchen cabinets. In contrast, he is strangely immature: "I'm not afraid to show my emotions," he yells. "I have high blood pressure [and] if I don't cry, I die!" (When he started about the long lines at Sephora -- the delay causing him to buy extra lip balm -- I had a few questions about that marriage, if you know what I mean.)

If Good Bones sometimes feels a tad unfurnished in the ideas department, the director Saheem Ali has filled it with a highly likable cast. Khris Davis' Earl is a thoughtful, soulful diamond in the rough, a craftsman whose natural skill and attention to detail is a form of grace; he's the kind of character one would like to know better. Susan Kelechi Watson, a performer of natural authority, does much to make Aisha palatable, especially in the later scenes, when she realizes that not everyone sees her efforts as philanthropic. The final image, of Aisha, alone, lost in thought, is especially potent. Mamoudou Athie leans a little hard on Travis' boyishness and unconscious entitlement, treading dangerously close to caricature. Tea Guarino makes a sprightly debut as Carmen, a finance student at Penn who, like Aisha is going places but who, like Earl, has strong roots.

Adding an extra touch of theatricality is Maruti Evans' set, originally seen covered in plastic that gets stripped off from scene to scene to reveal an immaculate interior; Barbara Samuels' meticulous lighting, especially her potent use of side angles, adds plenty of visual interest. Fan Zhang's sound design -- those eerie chuckles from nowhere -- contributes to the haunted atmosphere. With the possible exception of a dress for Aisha that seems a tad glitzy for an informal get-together, Oana Botez's costumes take note of the characters' differing social levels.

Ijames is too professional to write a truly dull play but Good Bones feels underpowered; it signals its ideas rather than vigorously arguing them. He remains a formidable talent but it's possible that this sort of discussion drama isn't his thing. --David Barbour