The Tower Records on Broad Street, the Borders bookstore on Chestnut, and the Kitchen Kapers boutique at the corner of Walnut and 17th Streets in Philadelphia: The playwright James Ijames shopped at all of them in the early 2000s while pursuing his M.F.A. at Temple University.
I frequented them as well, in the late 1990s, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. During a walk around downtown Philadelphia on a sweltering August afternoon, we noticed that those businesses were long gone. Passing by the buildings that once housed them, we reflected on how those old haunts endure, in some way, because they stay in our memories, paralleling many of the ideas of that lingering generational history Ijames gets at in his work.
Our small talk — about our fondness for the city, receiving Pulitzer Prizes the same year (in 2022) and being college professors — gave way to weightier issues: gentrification, ghosts and intergenerational trauma. Those subjects are all explored in “Good Bones,” his much-anticipated follow-up to his Tony-nominated “Fat Ham,” a Pulitzer winner about a Hamlet-inspired character’s struggles to overcome his family’s cycles of trauma and violence.
Ijames (pronounced “imes”) still lives in Philadelphia, with his husband, and teaches at Villanova University. (He is also a former co-artistic director of that city’s Wilma Theater, which produced a film version of “Fat Ham” in 2021, before the Public Theater in Manhattan staged the play’s in-person premiere in 2022.) As we stood on the corner of 15th and Locust Streets, he pointed out that his favorite video store is now a plastic surgery center.
“I loved TLA Video because they carried queer independent films, like ‘The Watermelon Woman.’ It was the only place I could find that stuff,” Ijames said. “I’m sad that there isn’t a place for a little queer boy to go.”
Those video finds also nurtured something else.
“TLA had these filmed theater productions you could buy or rent. I have a DVD of Blythe Danner and Frank Langella in ‘The Seagull’ at Williamstown Theater Festival [in 1974] at my house right now that I bought right here,” Ijames recalled. “I learned how to write dramatic literature that way.”
It was during another walking tour, in Washington, in 2017, that Ijames conceived “Good Bones,” which is now in previews at the Public. It was commissioned by the Studio Theater in Washington, where it had a world premiere run last spring. (The New York Times critic Jesse Green, who saw that earlier version, remarked on its geographic specificity: “Anyone who spends even a little time observing Washington’s glassy new high-rises squeezed up against its squat Federal piles, many built by enslaved people, will recognize Ijames’s spiritual geography: a place where history is both erased and inescapable.”)
Taking place in what Ijames describes as “big city USA,” the story revolves around Aisha; her husband, Travis; and their renovation of a historic townhouse that they purchased in the blighted neighborhood where Aisha was raised. Earl is the contractor helping them; he and his sister, Carmen, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, grew up in the same public housing development as Aisha.
Unlike Travis (played by Mamoudou Athie), a transplant who hails from a wealthy Black family, and Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), an advocate for the new sports arena coming to the area, Earl (Khris Davis) and Carmen (Téa Guarino) identify with the local Black working-class community that nurtured them, believe that it has many aspects worth preserving and are against gentrification. The central conflict stems from their different aspirations, socio-economic status, and notions about how best to save their city from ruin or rapid change.
Instead of a more traditional story of white people displacing their Black neighbors, “Good Bones” focuses on the class tensions among African Americans. Doing so complicates our understanding of gentrification, who is complicit in its proliferation and what are the potential solutions.
Watson, a Brooklyn native who played Beth Pearson on the TV show “This Is Us,” learned of the play when the director Saheem Ali gave her the script after they worked together, in 2021, on the Shakespeare in the Park production of “Merry Wives.”
The actress recalled being immediately attracted to the cadence of Ijames’s writing. “He just hears the real rhythm of the way people speak, so it doesn’t feel effortful to say his words,” she said in a recent interview. “If you just speak the words, the scene just builds itself. And when you give actors that kind of playfulness, that freedom of expression, because you’ve created such a strong structure, I think those are the strongest playwrights, and James is definitely one of those people.”
“Good Bones” provides another opportunity for the audience as well.
“We don’t often see her side,” she said of her character, who welcomes the stadium, “in an argument between two people from the same culture and background.”
Ali, who directed Ijames’s “Fat Ham” at the Public and on Broadway, was similarly drawn to Ijames’s unique depiction of this hot-button issue within the context of a Black family. “There’s a realness to James’s language,” Ali said. “It’s never posturing or trying to capture the way that Black America speaks that we’ve seen onstage before. There’s something so contemporary, truthful, funny, and piercing about it. And each of his plays has those elements, and they morph depending on what world it is in.”
As much as he relishes collaborating with Ijames (they’ve worked together on three plays), Ali was especially attracted to how “Good Bones” frames gentrification as a fundamentally American crisis.
“The first time I learned about eminent domain was when I moved to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia, and it was trying to buy up lots of places in Harlem so it could expand,” said Ali, who was born in Nairobi, Kenya. “I was just in awe that the government could take people’s property. And then, it is America. This country was built on displacing people.”
Of course, the challenge is conveying these complicated debates in a relatable and accessible way to an audience.
That’s where the ghosts come in.
At a recent rehearsal, white plastic bags were strewn everywhere, hanging as partitions and draperies. Onstage, doors suddenly opened, balls abruptly rolled, and a woman’s hearty laugh blaring through the speakers jolted me.
“Someone told me once, ‘You always have dead people and ghosts in your plays,” Ijames said. “I’m like, ‘Because those are the two things we always confront in life.’”
Unlike “Fat Ham,” in which his protagonist is tormented by his murdered dad, the “Good Bones” ghosts take on a more speculative and ethereal quality.
“What James has done so beautifully is have the ghost laughing,” Ali said. “Aisha then has to decide: ‘Is it laughing at me? Am I the subject of this joke? Am I the butt of it? Or is there something I’m missing that will remind me how to be in the present moment?”
“It ties her to a past,” he added. “What is the mythical past that reminds us about how to behave in the present to create a better future?”
When Ijames and I were in Philadelphia, passing empty storefronts, Ijames reflected, “The ghost in ‘Fat Ham’ is a little bit more ‘Scooby-Doo.’ It’s like a jump-out-of-something sort of ghost. In ‘Good Bones,’ it’s more spooky. It is the ghost of absence and of not having these places of community. It’s almost like the absence of those things almost haunts the cities.”
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