Review: Strange Occurrences Haunt a Couple’s Renovated Home in Good Bones

Some believe that buildings, like people, have memories. That seems to be the case in James Ijames’s eerie, funny, and sometimes head-scratching new play Good Bones, now running off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Following the Broadway premiere of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fat Ham last year, Good Bones shows Ijames’s once again using a ghostly presence to tell his story, but here he does so more subtly than in his occasionally shaky riff on Hamlet. Is there really a spirit laughing in the house, is it a neighbor outside, or is it all in the characters’ heads? Like much in this play, the answer is in the ear of the beholder.

Young, monied married couple Travis (Mamoudou Athie) and Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson) are renovating their palatial townhouse in a once prosperous Black enclave and are adding an enormous kitchen where Travis, an aspiring restaurateur and chef, can create his signature dishes like sweet potato pie foam (Maruti Evans’s enormous, high-ceilinged set is a study in impractical cabinetry). Travis grew up well-off, but Aisha has lifted herself up and out of the nearby projects and has a great gig working with a corporation that’s bulldozing a swath of her old neighborhood to make way for a sports arena.

Her job doesn’t sit well with contractor Earl (Khris Davis), who hails from the same part of town as Aisha and sees the arena not only as a leveler of buildings but as a destroyer of communities. Aisha has a more sympathetic ally in Earl’s sister, Carmen (Téa Guarino), a finance major and prospective pledge for Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., of which Aisha is a member. Though Earl is pissed, he agrees to have dinner with Travis, Aisha, and Carmen. But when the meal is upended by the revelation of another betrayal to the neighborhood, Aisha is left wondering whether the success she worked so hard for is worth the price of the community that she’s left in her wake.

This isn’t the kind of scenario that usually comes to mind when we think about gentrification. Ijames doesn’t focus on the other people who are behind the construction of the sports stadium. Instead, he raises a provocative question: Does an ambitious Black woman like Aisha have a responsibility to preserve and support the community she grew up in now that she has achieved a certain degree of wealth and power? If the house she’s living in has anything to say about it, yeah, she sure does.

Ijames and director Saheem Ali play with the haunting potential of the phrase “good bones,” an expression denoting a rundown building that’s structurally sound and has potential. Ali creates an uncanny atmosphere with Barbara Samuels’s shadowy lighting and Fan Zhang’s jarring bump-in-the-night sound design to suggest the house is trying to commune with the living — Aisha in particular. There’s a slowly opening door, a mysterious laugh, a ball that inexplicably bounces down the stairs. It’s a once creepy and forehead-wrinkling.

The actors have to knock down a wall to make some forced scenes work, such as when Earl tells Aisha that the house was once owned by the first Black woman on the city council (a significant detail you’d think a realtor would have mentioned to a prospective buyer), and that he and Carmen used to play in the abandoned house as kids. It’s a convenient way to create a bond between Earl and Aisha, who start flirting after some extended discussions about cabinet knobs. Watson and Davis are so good that they manage to make the scene work even though they’re hammering a nail with a screwdriver.

Good Bones is at its best when all four actors play off each other and let the comedy fly. Costume designer Oana Botez sets the tone with an array of colorful outfits — from Travis’s raspberry suit to Earl’s snakeskin boots — that tell stories about the characters as well as the script does. Athie is brilliant in his cuddly, cheesy portrayal of Travis, and Guarino steals the stage in a quiet way as the young voice of reason among these squabbling adults. It’s one of the best dysfunctional dinners I’ve seen.

Ijames lands the play so softly that it’s hard to tell we’ve arrived. Even so, Good Bones makes for an engaging hour and 45 minutes that teases out questions of responsibility to the people who nurtured us and the places we grew up in. Wherever you come from, there are enough creaky doors here to haunt us all.