Mamoudou Athie, Téa Guarino, Khris Davis, and Susan Kelechi Watson in the New York premiere production of Good Bones, by James Ijames and directed by Saheem Ali.
Photo: Joan Marcus
The audience’s first glimpse of the set of Good Bones, James Ijames’s new Off Broadway play at the Public, is obscured by a curtain of translucent plastic, the workaday material of any home renovation, hung to contain dust and fumes. During the course of the play, the plastic sheeting is gradually torn down by Earl (Khris Davis), a local contractor hired by the homeowners Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson) and Travis (Mamoudou Athie), revealing, by the last scene, an airy townhouse with high ceilings, French doors, and an open kitchen. That gradual unpeeling mimics the arc of the play, which traces the evolving dynamic between the couple and Earl as they wrap up their home renovation and confront the changes happening in the city.
At first, Aisha and Travis’s choice to buy and redo the house looks like a triumphant homecoming. It turns out that Aisha, like Earl, grew up in Dunbar Gardens, a housing project in an area she considers “a neglected corner of the city” — dangerous and sometimes deadly. As she confesses to Earl, she never thought she would return once she left. It’s her job that has brought them back, facilitating a development project aimed at revitalizing the neighborhood. The historic townhouse in Fennbrook that she and Travis, a chef with family money, have bought, is a tangible symbol of their commitment to settle down and raise a family there.
Khris Davis and Mamoudou Athie as Earl, a local contractor, and Travis, one of the home’s new owners, before the plastic sheeting is fully ripped down.
Photo: Joan Marcus
Earl welcomes them; he is initially excited that a Black family will inhabit the former home of the city’s first Black councilwoman. It becomes clear that for him, redoing their kitchen, or working on any of the old houses in the area, is not just a means to another paycheck. The attention he pays to the smallest details of the renovation, like the knobs on the kitchen cabinets, instead becomes a restoration project in his hands. “This place has a sense of history to it,” Travis appreciatively says to Earl, who, unbeknownst to him, is intimately connected to it. Earl and his sister Carmen (Téa Guarino) used to break into the house when it was boarded up and unoccupied and play there; he describes it as a tranquil refuge from everything else happening in the neighborhood.
But as the renovation progresses, and the kitchen is revealed, layer by layer, Earl learns exactly what Aisha’s ambitions to redevelop the community will entail, a plan he believes will displace longtime residents and erase the neighborhood’s legacy (he likens the project to the Death Star). Aisha thinks Earl has willfully ignored the state of “decay and atrophy” in Fennbrook, and argues that replacing what’s there with something new is necessary to make the place feel like home, a feeling she never had growing up there. Both characters have radically different visions for how to better their community, one marked by their different class backgrounds and also the gap between their approaches: preservation versus a ground-up reset.
Khris Davis as Earl in the earlier scenes of GOOD BONES, getting to know Aisha, played by Susan Kelechi Watson.
Photo: Joan Marcus
Before the culminating dinner party scene, all the plastic sheeting has come down to reveal the full kitchen renovation.
Photo: Joan Marcus
This tension is perhaps best embodied in the choices that Aisha and Travis make in the renovation. What initially seems like a blank construction site becomes, under their stewardship, a minimalist, monochromatic interior that calls to mind the omnipresent “greige” aesthetic of a model unit ready to be listed on the market. The coffered ceiling, the French doors, and an old radiator are the scant remnants of the house’s old bones, but the furnishings and finishes lack the “character and charm,” as Aisha and Earl discuss, of the bygone era. The tasteful Thonet armchairs and the farmhouse table blend into the neutral background, and it’s the actors, dressed in a vibrant palette, who bring any color or warmth to the scenes.
“We wanted these aesthetic choices to tell you something about the characters and their relationship to the world,” said Maruti Evans, the production’s set designer. “Are Aisha and Travis the type of people who choose their furniture, or did they hire a decorator? Are they not looking to stand out in the world they’re living in?” As Aisha and Earl argue over the redevelopment project, the bland decor alludes to the encroaching homogenization that Earl fears.
Their design choices also reflect the ways Aisha and Travis insulate themselves from the community they’ve moved into. The play doesn’t call them gentrifiers, but the couple’s all-gray palette and their reaction to the people and social life of the neighborhood show their allegiance to upper-class tastes and tendencies. Aisha closes the French doors to keep out the street noise, and Travis files a noise complaint that leads the cops to shut down Earl’s block party. Yet they’re unable to disentangle themselves from the neighborhood’s history, which the house is steeped in. “The past haunts us every day,” Earl tells Aisha. “Especially in places like this.”
Parts of the house were left slightly obscured to contribute to this illusion — that something could be lurking in the shadows. “When we explored those ghostly moments that happened in the plastic, we realized that the visuals of a ghost were less important than the sound of one,” said Saheem Ali, the director. “The plastic helped to create these small rooms or portals through which we framed the show.”
The climax of Good Bones occurs in the open kitchen. It’s the stage for the couple’s performance of neighborly goodwill: Travis invites Earl and Carmen over for a home-cooked dinner, but the façade of friendliness doesn’t last for long, as Earl and Aisha begin to clash over their respective visions. “I feel bad for y’all,” Earl says before walking out. “In this big old house. With no home.”
Community — continuity, traditions, familiar faces — is home, as Earl implores. At first, those ties to the past appear to haunt Aisha, before they lead her to question the urban renewal project she so firmly believed in. Good Bones concludes with her opening the French doors she’d previously kept shut. She sits and takes in the neighborhood noise, attempting to dwell in the outside world. In doing so, she also opens the house to the audience, and the idea of home as a fortress, a magazine-ready sanctuary, starts to fade as the walls permeate with the sounds of city life.
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