Téa Guarino, Khris Davis, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Mamoudou Athie in the Good Bones. Photo: Joan Marcus.

There’s plenty of big issues and ideas at the core of Good Bones—forming its skeleton, if you can’t resist the metaphor—the meaning of community, of home, of family; the rifts of class and gender and history; where we draw the line between progress and destruction, between revitalization and gentrification. But James Ijames’s follow-up to Fat Ham, likewise directed by Saheem Ali, hasn’t found the relationships, the story, or most crucially the setting, to build out more than a skeleton, to give any of those concepts a human weight. Fat Ham worked best when it found its own vibrant mode of storytelling, letting go of realism to do something weirder. And you see, now and again, peeking around the edges of Good Bones, a darker, richer piece, one that gives more of a theatrical voice to the ghosts that tug at the history and the bonds between the central couple. But too often, it feels like an inert clash of perspectives, so afraid of not being clear in its positions that it loses its emotional core.

Set in the expansive, monochrome dove-gray kitchen that contractor Earl (Khris Davis) is renovating for homeowners Travis (Mamoudou Athie) and Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), Good Bones ends up feeling trapped in that room. The play is crucially about a community—a historically Black neighborhood in a never-named city, where Aisha, Earl, and Earl’s sister, Carmen (Téa Guarino), all grew up, with radically different experiences. (Travis, the son of wealthier Black parents, had a different childhood in another part of the country.) Aisha, the daughter of a hardworking single mother who died young of cancer, got out as fast and as far as she could; her memories are mostly traumatic. But she’s come back on the other side of the economic divide, buying a historic home that had fallen into disrepair and restoring it, with a budget augmented by Travis’s family. Travis has become the trailing spouse as Aisha moves from state to state in pursuit of an ever-more-prestigious career. A chef, he is finally settling down in their new home and opening a restaurant, one that, mirroring the play’s themes, “elevates” soul food to fine dining. He’s gentrifying a cuisine that’s rooted in Black history, much as he and Aisha are helping to gentrify a neighborhood with deep roots as a wealthy Black community. These are legacies that Aisha and Travis simultaneously claim and rebuff; they want the “good bones” of the past but they also want to turn them into something else.

Earl and Carmen, on the other hand, have spent their lives deeply enmeshed in this place; he is building his contracting business on the neighborhood’s newly flush homeowners, while Carmen, a student at an elite college, comes home summers and helps him out. The job that brought Aisha back is a position as a community liaison to a new stadium and neighborhood development initiative, which will involve tearing down the housing projects where all three grew up. Aisha thinks she’s bringing positive change to a community that harmed her; Earl thinks she’s the Black face hired to put lipstick on the pig of displacement and community destruction, to “help the franchise speak the language of the community” in a pandering way. 

The play is set, explicitly, in a place at a turning point: the kitchen, pale gray and draped in semi-transparent plastic sheets that come down one by one over the course of the action, is both elegant and personality-less, the definition between elements hard to see in all the monochrome. Maruti Evans’s set both captures the grandeur of the space and pokes a little bit of fun at the couple’s aesthetic choices; the kitchen only really comes to life when Travis cooks in it. Oana Botez’s costumes bring pops of rich color, but the muted gray threatens to swallow them. The color feels a little ghostly, which is apropos since there are indications of hauntings: faint laughs, a ball rolling down the stairs, murmurs of voices. Aisha hears them more than the others–again apropos; she’s the one navigating the contrast between her past and her present.  

But the vision of community Earl espouses doesn’t ever feel real. Outside of the occasional ghostly laugh, the only representation of the outside world is a noisy party that Travis reports to a NextDoor-type app, unintentionally calling the police and getting the party shut down. Earl and Aisha both describe landmark locations in the community, but even these feel somehow generic; in trying to set the story everyplace, Ijames has set it noplace. 

I also found myself tripped up by logistical hiccups in the narrative. Aisha and Travis say they’ve been back in the area (perhaps not in the house?) for just over a year, but Travis is annoyed enough by one noisy party to report it. If there’s a party every weekend, it seems odd that this one bothers him so much; if this is the first time there’s been this sort of noise in a year, it seems like anyone interested in putting down roots in a community wouldn’t report a single party. Earl has clearly been working for weeks–he’s almost done–but Aisha can’t remember his name one day, then the next they seem to have a flirty connection even though it seems like the first time Earl has found out anything about Aisha. In one key conversation in this scene, Ali has them sit down on the floor when the conversation gets intense–which struck me as an oddly intimate thing to do on a first conversation, let alone in a room under construction. Davis and Watson are both performers with enough warmth and fire to spark a connection, but the tonal shifts in Aisha and Earl’s relationship are still hard to wrangle. 

In the end, though, the thing that bothered me the most is that Good Bones, in striving for the potential of a happy ending–an ending where Aisha and Travis begin to really listen to the community around them and the ghosts in their home–starts to invalidate Aisha’s pain and fear. Her stubborn, blinkered insistence that the stadium is good for the neighborhood may be misguided—she comes around to Earl’s “Death Star” nomenclature for the structure—but the trauma she endured there isn’t. In validating the concerns of Earl and the community, Good Bones seems to cast doubt on Aisha’s experiences, on the less positive legacies of place, flattening the complexity of the very issue it’s trying to interrogate.