Chicago Reader52%
Good People returns in a stellar revival with 4 Chairs Theatre 19%
By Kerry Reid0%
7/23/2026, 3:41:30 PM
Topics: Theater Review
BS Summary: This article contains 9 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Hasty Generalization, and Negativity Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 14.8% saturation with 133 hits. Analysis detected 476 faulty-reasoning hits from 899 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34% and a BS Rank of 19% (17,205 of 21,188 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.20% of the article peer group.
South Boston may be the one place in the U.S. where white urban poverty (and often crime) is regularly presented in cultural narratives: Good Will Hunting, The Departed, and Gone Baby Gone all come to mind.
But David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2011 play, Good People, now in an engaging and well-acted revival with 4 Chairs Theatre under Lauren Berman’s direction, despite the Southie accents ringing out from the stage at Theater Wit, resonates beyond Dorchester Bay.
Lindsay-Abaire’s story offers keen insights into how a lifetime on an economic and emotional knife-edge leaves soul-deep scars.
Good People
Through 8/23: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Theater Wit, 1229 W.
Belmont, 773-975-8150, theaterwit.org or 4chairstheatre.org, $38-$60
Margie Walsh (called “Margie” with a hard “g”) works at a dollar store where, when we first meet her, she’s in the process of getting canned by Stevie, the store manager.
Margie has been late too many times and the district manager won’t stand for it anymore.
Stevie’s hands are tied.
Margie (Jodi Kingsley) feints and dodges to avoid hearing what Stevie (Steven Horn) is about to say, pulling out every bit of desperate bonhomie and charm she can find.
At one point, she recounts a story about his mom, who famously tried to shoplift an entire Thanksgiving dinner from a grocery store where Margie works.
Turns out, Stevie’s version of the story isn’t as funny as what Margie remembers, which lays the groundwork for what follows, where stories from the past reverberate, leaving us wondering what’s true or not.
Margie’s main difficulty is that she’s the caregiver for an unseen adult daughter, Joyce, who was born with profound disabilities when Margie was still in high school.
(She never graduated).
At just over nine dollars an hour, Margie’s wages aren’t enough to cover regular in-home aides, so she relies on her unreliable landlady, Dottie (Maggie Cain), who seems more focused on making little rabbits out of flower pots and styrofoam balls and selling them for five bucks a pop at bingo.
Margie’s friend Jean (Wendy Hayne) tells her about running into Margie’s old high school sweetheart, Mike, at a banquet where Jean was working as a server.
He’s a doctor now, and maybe he can give her some sort of job.
Good People has some narrative similarities with Amy Herzog’s 2024 play, Mary Jane, produced earlier this year at Northlight Theatre, mostly in the story of a single mother trying to juggle caring for their disabled child while earning a living.
But where Herzog’s play offered a glimpse of a community surrounding the title character, Lindsay-Abaire’s play leaves Margie with few good options.
She does visit Mike (Bryan Breau) at his office—he’s a success story who got out of Southie and became a reproductive endocrinologist.
He doesn’t have a job for Margie, but he tells her, after she more or less pushes him, that she can come to his birthday party and maybe see if any of his friends need help.
When he disinvites her because his kid is sick, Margie assumes he’s trying to avoid her, and she shows up at his house anyway, where she meets his Black wife, Kate (Sandra Adjoumani).
Turns out, he wasn’t lying about the sick kid, but he’s definitely kept things from his wife.
Social awkwardness soon turns to explosive revelations.
The title of Lindsay-Abaire’s play gets to the crux of his concerns.
Yes, it’s a play about race, class, gender, and poverty.
The playwright grew up in Southie himself, so he knows the world well, and that comes through clearly here, especially in the interactions among Dottie, Margie, and Jean—three plainspoken-to-a-fault women, or as Jean describes herself, “a mouthie from Southie.”
Margie’s needling Mike about being “lace-curtain Irish” gets under his skin.
He doesn’t think he’s lost sight of his roots.
But when Margie reveals a horrific incident from his past that he’s kept hidden from Kate, his anger and his accent come out from beneath the polished yuppie facade.
Good People came out of the economic collapse of 2008.
Sadly, the circumstances for women like Margie haven’t gotten any better in 2026.
Yet the poignant thing about the play is how much Margie still tries to hang onto her own sense of decency and her own rules for conduct even as everything is collapsing around her.
It should be noted that the play is often quite funny, with Cain especially going to town with Dottie.
Kingsley anchors the production with her sensitive and multifaceted embodiment of Margie, but the ensemble is excellent throughout.
Breau’s Mike is at times so smarmy that I wanted to slap him, but he also shows us a man desperate to hang onto the new version of himself that he’s become, while also deeply invested in his image as a goodhearted guy from the old neighborhood, even if he’s moved on to cushier environs in Chestnut Hill.
Kevin Rolfs’s set uses sliding metal doors like the sides of a shipping container to reveal the split between Margie’s humble kitchen and Kate and Mike’s well-appointed living room.
A collection of empty boxes and garbage bins at one side, as well as the stories about what’s happened to other Southie classmates of Margie and Mike’s, reminds us of how fragile and disposable the American dream really is, no matter how good a person may be.
Analysis
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