BWW Reviews: Clackamas Rep Deftly Depicts the Struggles of GOOD PEOPLE

My father was a construction worker in Michigan in the 1960s and 1970s, when Detroit was just beginning to fall into disrepair. He was constantly out of work, and we struggled to keep our home and life afloat. To my dad, who never went to college, the greatest achievement in life was to rise above one's humble beginnings and make something of yourself. And the greatest compliment he could pay was to call someone "good people." He reserved that title for those who looked out for him, who helped him find work, who acted unselfishly at times when everyone was trying to keep their heads above water.

We all think of ourselves as kind, honest, loving people who mean well toward others and have only the best intentions. Who among us would cast himself or herself as a villain? Yet we have very little control over how others perceive us. We've all said "I hate that guy!" about someone who's done us a slight, not bothering to consider how that person might see us or what their perspective might be on whatever offense they caused us. In short, we're all flawed creatures trying to survive, trying not to harm others, but still now and then rubbing someone the wrong way.

David Lindsay-Abaire's 2011 play Good People illustrates this principle far better than my tortured paragraph above. Margie is in her late forties, a single mother with a mentally challenged adult daughter who needs constant care. She lives paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay the rent and other bills with a job at a dollar store, while paying her landlady a few dollars to watch her daughter while she's at work. The landlady doesn't like to get up in the morning, which makes Margie late for work far too often, which costs her her job at the beginning of the play. We're in South Boston ("Southie"), a working-class neighborhood where everyone seems to be on the edge of disaster. Margie and her high school friend, Jean, talk about classmates who've "made it out," who've gone on to better things, but too many of their friends have ended up broke, in jail, or dead. The only amusement they seem to have is their weekly bingo games.

Jean tells Margie that she's run into Mike, a high-school fling of Margie's who now has a lucrative medical practice, a fancy home, and a beautiful wife. She suggests Margie ask Mike for a job, or use his connections to get a job, and Margie does. And once Margie, who never graduated high school and doesn't know "five-dollar words," goes to see Mike, a reproductive endocrinologist, we're watching a class collision right out of a textbook.

Director David Smith-English keeps us guessing throughout the play how the collision will play out. It helps that the playwright has written the characters in a very even-handed way; at no time is either Mike or Margie completely right or completely wrong; we see them both as people trying to do the right thing, yet also trying to hold on to what they already have. Margie needs to keep her apartment and to maintain her daughter's care; Mike is trying to hold on to his comfortable life and his somewhat rocky marriage. The play starts out small, with light banter and seemingly innocuous encounters, but it builds into a life-or-death struggle between Mike and Margie, with Mike's wife, Kate, also trying to achieve some objectives of her own.

The performances are uniformly strong, with Lorraine Bahr dazzling as Margie. She almost never leaves the stage, yet her energy is at full strength throughout. She tosses her long hair like a teenage girl, and still uses the thick Southie accent she was born with, yet when she's crossed she turns into a tiger. It's both ferocious and funny, and Bahr never lets her become a caricature; this lady is complicated. Doren Elias is just as good as Mike, who keeps getting tangled in his own half-truths. Elias uses a smooth, charming manner to show the world he's a good guy, but his temper is never far from the surface. As Kate, Damaris Webb is all grace and charm at first, but she has her own agenda, and we gradually see that she, too, has made some compromises; Webb is brilliant at finding the fighter under the upper-crust exterior.

The smaller roles are just as well played. Amanda Valley as Jean and Cyndy Smith-English as Dottie (the landlady) make the most of their banter and their honking Southie accents, but there is anger and frustration under their skin, and the characters' self-interest keeps showing through. Likewise, Sam Levi as Stevie, Margie's young boss at the dollar store, takes what could have been a one-note role and lends it some unexpected depth.

As usual at Clackamas Rep, the technical credits are all well handled, though I found Chris Whitten's set design a bit distracting; the cartoonish depiction of a cityscape, all black and neon, was fascinating to look at before the play started, but the colors and designs pulled focus from the play's realistic depiction of Margie's life. However, lighting, costumes, and wigs were all niclely done, and the complex scene changes were done smoothly.

I'm sure my father would have found Good People too complicated; he'd have sided with Margie and found Mike to be a pompous jerk. I can think of others I know who would empathize with Mike and Kate and find Margie annoying and pushy. The brilliant thing about this play is that everyone can see themselves in it, and the characters all have good and bad sides, often at the same exact moment. Which is true of all of us, if you think about it.

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