“Good People” – Great Show!

Charlie and I both thoroughly enjoyed Geva’s Good People, directed by Mark Cuddy, on its opening night two weeks ago – it’s funny, it’s thought-provoking, and it deals with issues that we here in Rochester can definitely relate to, even though it’s set in South Boston. And speaking of setting, the rotating triangular sets were fantastic and seamless (I’d seen this concept once before, in the first Broadway production of Chess, and it was a miracle no one was hurt, they were so erratic).

All of the actors are wonderful, and it was impossible to tell whose accent was real (Mark informed us at a pre-show talk that one of the actors actually hails from Boston) and whose were not, and Charlie and I each guessed a different person. I saw the show again on my regular subscription night, this time with my sister-in-law Kathryn, and my friend Jan. I was worried I might not enjoy it as much, knowing some of the jokes and all of the dramatic twists, but I think I actually liked it more, since I had had time to think about the issues in between. The characters of Good People remind us that, just as in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” you can never know what might have happened if you’d chosen a different path. And they remind us that our memory is more elastic than photographic – we mold it to fit the story we want to make of the memory. That “truth” is not something absolute, and that one person’s “luck,” when viewed from a different perspective, is actually guided by unacknowledged, but very real actions on the part of other people.

Jan emailed me the next morning, saying, “I keep thinking about the play we saw last night, which is most often my measure of whether I really liked something or not – if I leave and never think about it again it probably was good, but not good enough to think about again. So I must have really loved the play.”

Good People is yet another memorable Geva co-production that will move elsewhere when it ends its run here on November 16. So unless you are planning to visit Indianapolis in January, see it here, soon.