Review - Good People & That Championship Season

If Bill Clinton really was, as Toni Morrison put it, America's first black president, then perhaps it's about time we crowned David Lindsay-Abaire as America's leading female playwright. Since first gaining major attention in 1999 with Fuddy Meers, and including major productions such as Kimberly Akimbo, Wonder of the World and the Pulitzer-winning Rabbit Hole, Lindsay-Abaire (whose surname is a hyphenated combination of his and his wife's last names) has been continually filling stages with unique and interesting women as his leading characters.

In Good People, Frances McDormand is the beneficiary of his latest leading creation; a tough, desperate, one-paycheck-away-from-the-street single mom named Margaret who is too poor to worry about her abrasive frankness making people uncomfortable. We and the playwright are the beneficiaries of McDormand's sharp, no-nonsense performance, under Daniel Sullivan's direction, that creates empathy for a character that doesn't want your sympathy, unless it'll get her a job.

Though a conscientious worker, this Southie - a native of working class South Boston - has trouble staying employed because her inability to pay for proper care of her mentally disabled adult daughter leads to frequent lateness and the need for days off. When she finds out her high school ex, Mike (Tate Donovan), who became a successful doctor after their breakup, is back in town, she manipulates her way into his office to ask for help getting work. Mike, made nervous by Margaret's directness regarding her need, invites her to a party at his home where there'll be many successful friends and associates who might be able to help.

Suspicious when she gets a phone message saying the party had to be cancelled, Margaret shows up anyway and sees what her future might have been if past life decisions were made differently. In a clever twist, Mike's wife Kate (Renée Elise Goldsberry), the only black character in the play, mistakes Margaret for one of the hired help that may not have gotten the message from the agency not to come. But when she finds out her unexpected guest is an old friend of her husband, she can't wait to break open a bottle of wine and spend the night learning about Mike's previously well-guarded past.

Eventually, issues of class and race turn the initially uncomfortable evening ugly and Goldsberry is excellent in playing Kate's conflicting sympathies as she weighs what Margaret says to be her husband's past against her growing suspicion of her visitor's motives.

Lightening the mood a bit, particularly in scenes at the local Bingo hall, are Estelle Parsons as Margaret's landlady and Becky Ann Baker as a neighborhood friend. Though their roles largely serve to introduce expository conversations and add some laughs they never come off as comic relief. Rounding out the fine cast is Patrick Carroll as Margaret's manager at her last job, a good guy who was forced to fire her at the risk of losing his own job.

Photo of Frances McDormand and Renée Elise Goldsberry by Joan Marcus.

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A Tony and Pulitzer winner, Jason Miller's That Championship Season was undoubtedly a play for its time when it opened on Broadway in 1972. America was in the last years of the nation's first significantly unpopular war and advanced media coverage made many question the heroism of the men who fought it. On top of that, the women's liberation movement of the 60s gave birth to the sensitive male of the 70s who rejected the seemingly perfect masculine ideals of the past and was comfortable with his flaws.

An ensemble piece that seems intent on giving each character a big moment, director Gregory Mosher's new production certainly showcases its five-member cast well, but the evening never takes off as it should.

The play is set at a 20-year reunion of four members of the starting line-up of a Catholic high school's basketball team that came from behind to win the state's championship game with a do-or-die play in the final ten seconds. (The 5th member of the starting lineup refuses to attend, but no mention is made of the bench players.) The victory is treated with historic reverence by the town's citizens and for the four players present, this youthful moment of glory is something they've been clinging to throughout their adult lives.

The home of the man known simply as Coach (Brian Cox) is depicted by set designer Michael Yeargan with classically masculine wooden features. Now terminally ill (though it's hard to tell by Cox's rather robust performance), Coach remains the father figure for these 38-year-olds and as the evening progresses we see the ugly imperfections underneath this leader of arrested adolescents.

Jim Gaffigan is the town's inept mayor who is fearful of losing his reelection attempt to a Jew, despite the efforts of Kiefer Sutherland's character, the junior high school principal who is also his ineffectual campaign manager. Chris Noth is the successful businessman who gets special favors from the mayor while sleeping with his wife and Jason Patric (the playwright's son) plays the cynical alcoholic writer who seems to have wandered into the wrong theatre on his way to starring in a production of The Boys In The Band.

But like the sitcoms of Norman Lear, that were revolutionizing television comedy with the issues and characters they were sending into American homes during those early 70s (All In The Family, Maude, Good Times), what was shocking during That Championship Season's initial run seems a bit quaint and heavy-handed now; particularly when the characters casually blurt out racist, sexist and anti-Semitic remarks. (When Coach mourns over the tragic assassinations that took place in the 60s he rather obviously leaves out Martin Luther King.)

While That Championship Season certainly has value as a museum piece, this competent production makes no satisfactory argument for its value as a night out at a Broadway play for contemporary audiences.

Photo of Brian Cox, Jason Patric, Jim Gaffigan, Chris Noth, and Kiefer Sutherland by Joan Marcus.

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"In London they don't like you if you're still alive."

-- Harvey Fierstein

The grosses are out for the week ending 3/27/2011 and we've got them all right here in BroadwayWorld.com's grosses section.

Up for the week was: LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (8.6%), GHETTO KLOWN (8.3%), Million Dollar Quartet (4.0%), BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGDHAD ZOO (0.7%), ANYTHING GOES (0.2%), HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING (0.1%), THE BOOK OF MORMON (0.1%), WAR HORSE (0.1%),

Down for the week was: THE ADDAMS FAMILY (-16.5%), MAMMA MIA! (-10.2%), THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON (-10.0%), THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (-9.0%), THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT (-8.6%), MARY POPPINS (-6.4%), CHICAGO (-6.0%), DRIVING MISS DAISY (-4.9%), RAIN: A TRIBUTE TO THE BEATLES ON BROADWAY (-4.2%), PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT (-4.1%), JERSEY BOYS (-4.0%), AMERICAN IDIOT (-3.4%), ARCADIA (-2.9%), SPIDER-MAN TURN OFF THE DARK (-1.9%), MEMPHIS (-1.7%), CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (-1.7%), THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (-1.5%), THE LION KING (-1.0%), LOMBARDI (-0.7%), BILLY ELLIOT: THE MUSICAL (-0.1%),