Washington Post - Highly Recommended
"...The people of "Good People" aren't all that good - which is partly why the play is better than good. As consequences of David Lindsay-Abaire's wisdom-filled script and Jackie Maxwell's superbly modulated direction, the evening in Arena Stage's Kreeger Theater delivers robust helpings of insight and laughs."
DC Theater Arts - Highly Recommended
"...The pivotal character in David Lindsay-Abaire's new play Good People, directed at Arena Stage by Jackie Maxwell, has no lines and never comes onstage. All she does is fiddle with the TV in a room behind the kitchen, sometimes turning up the volume until it's so loud that we can't hear the characters who do have lines. When that happens, her mother, Margie, has to interrupt her train of thought, get up from the table, and leave the stage to turn the volume down. Her friends wait for the noise to stop, exchanging looks that show how often this has happened. When she comes back, the train of thought is gone."
Washington Examiner - Highly Recommended
"...To Margaret, "good people" means people who are the salt of the earth, people who help one another. In Margaret particularly, Lindsay-Abaire has created one truly fascinating "good person" and Arena's production is a moving testament to the depth and insight of this unique, socially relevant play."
MetroWeekly - Highly Recommended
"...Inhabiting Margaret with supernatural insight and a comic timing to beat the band, Johanna Day makes this woman utterly and inexorably her own. With consummate skill and subterranean artistry, she captures the ready smile and quick words of a woman who has learned to mask a lifetime's worth of anger and disappointment. It's a face that says, ''Big deal, I saw it coming,'' with each of life's knocks. But as stoic as Margaret may be, Day ensures a view onto a far more complicated inner landscape. In her canny confidence, her searching eyes, Day delivers the Margaret that refuses to ''grow in a row,'' even if it costs her."
Talkin Broadway - Highly Recommended
"...Too often, plays that examine issues of social class and inequality are polemical and preachy at the expense of entertainment value. Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire demonstrates the right way to treat this kind of material in Good People, which crackles and shoots verbal sparks in its current production at Arena Stage in Washington, DC."
Washington City Paper - Recommended
"...There aren't really any good people in Good People, but there are some rattling good fights and a fascinating exploration of American notions of class-specifically, what the upwardly mobile owe the less-fortunate folks they've clambered over. And at the play's final preview, Jackie Maxwell's explosively funny, and then just plain explosive, production was brusquely making the social undertones resonate even as it showcased a stageful of rich, affecting performances-chief among them Long's slow-burning but combustible Mike, Francesca Choy-Kee as Mike's poised but insecure wife, and Day's passive-aggressive, angry, vulnerable, empathetic trainwreck of a heroine-one you'll root for and shrink from in about equal measure."
Washingtonian - Highly Recommended
"...As if the cast's dramatic range weren't affecting enough, impeccable comic timing and chemistry infuse the production with a weighty authenticity that hits the story's many messages home even harder. Tapping the uncomfortable nerve that awkward interactions expose seems to be a growing comedic trend in recent years, and in this case it's clear why the approach is so effective. Laughing or wincing, your emotional connection with the material is heightened. The play is not funny in the way a laugh-tracked sitcom might be; it's funny in the way real life is."
DCTheatreScene - Recommended
Good People is Lindsay-Abaire’s exquisitely crafted, lovingly drawn study of his own hardscrabble South Boston roots. The play takes on the profound dividing lines of class and raises intractable questions about how we get to where we get in life, whether we deserve that placement, and the way we justify our accounting in the social hierarchy.
