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Health & Fitness

MTC's Comedy-Drama, 'Good People,' Electrifies Critics

On opening nights, most professional critics and reviewers typically resemble frozen statues.

We’re afraid if we show emotion — indeed, any expression — we’ll give away what won’t appear in print on online for several hours or days.

We’re usually positioned in aisle seats so we can leave the instant a show ends, a throwback to the ancient days of daily newspaper deadlines being only minutes away. Nowadays, we still speed away unobtrusively — mainly to avoid other theatergoers asking probing questions we don’t want to answer.

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But Good People, the new comedy-drama at the Marin Theatre Company, electrified us and made us break our unwritten rules.

Theatrical blasphemy?

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Maybe, but I watched normally deadpan writers convulse with laughter during the show, then applaud vigorously at the final curtain.

Perhaps that explains why Good People was the most produced play in America during the 2012-13 season — having been presented in 17 cities.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire appears to be well on his way to becoming a household name — even if that name may be difficult to pronounce.

He’s already won a Pulitzer for drama, in 2007 for Rabbit Hole. And acclaim for his cartoonish stage work on Shrek the Musical and his cinematic skill with Oz: The Great and Powerful.

He also wrote Fuddy Meers, which critic/reviewer Woody Weingarten — oh, that’s me, isn’t it? — called an “uproarious, rollicking rollercoaster ride” about “fuzzy memories and motives, masked identities [and] twisted realities.”

Lemme see now. That’s odd. Good People, which played on Broadway in 2011 with Frances McDormand as its star, is, ultimately, all about fuzzy memories and motives, masked identities and twisted realities.

But it ends up a lot more dramatic.

And honest.

Basically a play about class struggle and the difficulty of extricating oneself from a lower socio-economic neighborhood (in this instance, Southie, or South Boston), Good People focuses on a single mom whose adult daughter has been mentally disabled since birth 30 years previously.

Southie, as might be expected, is where the playwright hails from — although he escaped by scholarship to a prep school in a wealthy suburb.

The Boston Globe quoted him looking back: “I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.”

He depicts that tension and conflict brilliantly in Good People.

Being potty-mouthed is an integral part of being a Lindsay-Abaire inhabitant of Southie. Witness Margie Walsh (Amy Resnick) and her two bingo-playing cronies (Jamie Jones as Jean and Anne Darragh as Dottie). But escapees such as prosperous fertility doctor Mike Dillon (Mark Anderson Phillips), whom Margie dated in high school, have learned to be much more genteel — until provoked.

Margie — who futilely tries to lighten her tongue with a coy “pardon my French” and is convinced she won’t ever leave South Boston, piles on passive self-loathing. But she’s also an aggressive back-stabber and airer of dirty laundry.

She’s particularly adept at pushing Mike’s buttons.

Though Good People contains a glimpse of black-white strains, not unheard of in Boston, there’s a more subtle variation here than I’d have predicted. Despite her dark skin, ZZ Moor’s striking portrayal of elegant Kate Dillon is finely nuanced despite her having to speak such broad-stroked zingers as, “If it’s any consolation, people always think I’m the nanny.”

And what would a modern play be without a couple of overt references to anti-gay bias?

Lindsay-Abaire is at his best, however, when exhibiting class differences. Consider this couplet, which follows an edgy discussion of the Dillons offering Margie $15 an hour to baby-sit:

“Margaret doesn’t want our charity.”

“Sure I do.”

Director Tracy Young has cloaked each character in authenticity and simultaneously cultivated the superb acting chops of each of her actors.

She also made the two-act, two-act play feel as if it lasts only half that time.

The MTC production is flawed only by inconsistent accents, which ebb and flow like the Charles River, and the fact that Margie and Mike don’t look nearly as old as they’re written.

At the foundation of the play, though, is the complicated answer to the question of who’s a good person and who’s not.

It’s decidedly worth watching to find out.

Good People will play at the Marin Theatre Company. 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through Sept. 15. Night performances, 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays through Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 7 p.m. Sundays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; 1 p.m. Thursdays. Tickets: $20 to $53. (415) 388-5208 or www.marintheatre.org.

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