Review: A Family Deals With Tradition and Change in Charming One of the Good Ones

One of the Good Ones, now making it world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse, employs the tropes of many mid-20^th-century stage comedies to explore the generation gap, cultural identity, and nationalism in the Latiné community. Conventional yet charming, this play by Gloria Calderón Kellett reveals the universality of familial strife.

Ilana (Lana Parrilla), in the throes of a menopausal episode, fusses about getting ready to meet her daughter’s new boyfriend. Ilana, who is Puerto Rican and Mexican American, feels guilty that she neither speaks nor comprehends Spanish when her husband, Enrique (Carlos Gomez), and daughter, Yoli (Isabella Gomez), speak it fluently.

Yoli, who just graduated from college, enjoys confronting her parents on some of their problematic ancestral history, and constantly cajoles them to open up about their feelings. Enrique is stalwart and machismo, while Ilana hates confrontation, so despite the deep love the family has for one another, they tend to argue quite a bit. Onto this already shaky ground steps Marcos (Nico Greetham), who brings with him a bottle of wine, a large piñata, and a host of issues for the family to unwrap.

Though the plot is informed by many family-conflict comedies, the play’s  truest antecedent is the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, where two liberal white parents are confronted with their subconscious biases when their daughter brings home her fiancé. One of the Good Ones flourishes when it focuses on a Latiné family confronted with their own fears of assimilation and an erasure of their heritage — a dilemma shared by many minority families who risk losing pride in their own background as they try to blend into America’s so-called melting pot.

Marcos, the family outsider, brings up prejudices concerning what makes a person Latiné — where you’re born, what language you speak, how many generations took part in your culture. These compelling questions are handled deftly by Calderón Kellert, who co-created the 2017 Netflix series One Day at a Time. One of the Good Ones provides plenty of funny dialogue that comes from characterizations rather than canned sitcom jokes, but it unfolds in a traditionally predictable way that could have benefited from more outside-the-box revelations.

Parrilla charmingly reveals Ilana’s insecurities as a woman who married young, never learned to cook or converse in her native tongue, and sometimes feels adrift in her own family. Her television persona in such shows as Once Upon a Time has leaned more toward the devious, so it’s pleasantly disarming to see her play a less controlled character so whimsically.

Carlos Gomez has a natural cadence with the dialogue that allows him to convey his character’s love for his daughter and consternation effectively. Isabella Gomez clearly relishes Yoli’s troublemaking traits and peppers her performance with impish charm. Greetham successfully walks the line between youthful exuberance, charisma, and ignorance of his white privilege, allowing him to come off as naïve rather than exasperating.

Director Kimberly Senior never lets life lessons overweigh the humor. She surrounds her characters with Tanya Orellana’s opulent suburban mansion set. Denitsa Bliznakova’s costumes include a lovely sun dress for Isabella Gomez, a powerbroker casual sports jacket for Carlos Gomez, and a preppy shirt and jeans for Greentham that immediately clues the audience into his background. Parrilla’s free-flowing outfit accommodates her character’s discomforting hot flashes.

One of the Good Ones is a congenial play that manages to confront difficult issues in a breezy way. Hopefully, families will take a cue from the characters and use the opportunity to consider and converse about the tangled branches of their own family trees.