A RETURN TO SOUTHIE, BY WAY OF BROADWAY

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published in the New York Times: February 3, 2011

THE playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for “Rabbit Hole,” grew up in South Boston — Southie, as it’s known. Southie, the setting of his much anticipated Broadway follow-up, “Good People,” is a neighborhood of narrow streets and small houses jammed together on a peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor and cut off from downtown by an old shipping channel. Even to some Bostonians, growing up here is a little like growing up on the moon. They know the place mostly from gritty movies set there, like “Good Will Hunting” and “The Departed.”

Until fairly recently, when gentrifiers began slipping in, the neighborhood was Irish, Catholic and working class, and famously proud, insular, stubborn and independent. Southie was the home of the mobster Whitey Bulger, a local hero to many. In the mid-’70s it was a bastion of anti-busing sentiment — not, many residents insisted, because people in Southie had anything against blacks but because they didn’t care for outsiders, period. And the place has always been known for the local brand of dark humor, which thrives on misery and adversity.

While not autobiographical, “Good People” is the first of Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s plays to explore the world he came from, and it features a character who, like him, moves away and becomes a success. Now 41, he lives in the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn with his wife and two children. But on a bitterly cold day a couple of weeks ago, when the shipping channel was nearly frozen solid and residents had staked out their carefully shoveled parking spots with traffic cones and lawn chairs, he dropped by the old neighborhood for the first time in a while, to wander around and to talk about the play, which stars Frances McDormand, Tate Donovan, and Estelle Parsons. It begins previews on Tuesday at the Friedman Theater.

Mr. Lindsay-Abaire is a small, chunky man who seems unusually at home in his own skin and seldom stops smiling. He strolled around Southie, pointing out landmarks, as if pleased to discover that the place was still there. He stopped by his old house on West Fifth Street and explained that his mother had been born there. When he was a boy, she worked in an electronics factory, making circuit boards, while his father, also a Southie native, sold fruit from the back of a truck.

He was just David Abaire back then (he picked up the extra name when he married the actress Chris Lindsay in 1994) and spent nearly every afternoon at the local Boys Club (later a Boys and Girls Club) a few blocks away. Jennifer Gordon, a friend who still lives in the old neighborhood, recalled: “David was a smart kid right from the get-go. The rest of us would go there to goof off, but he was always there doing his homework. You knew that this kid was going somewhere.”

She added that at Harvard Law School, where she works, someone will every now and then give a surprised look upon learning that she’s from Southie. “I tell them, I grew up next door to a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, so back off,” she said. “I love being able to say that.”

Pattie McCormick and Anne Gordon (no relation to Jennifer), two staff members from Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s time, still work at the club, and they greeted him warmly but deferentially, as if he were a visiting prelate, before showing him around, pointing out what had changed (new gym, new computers, new guinea pigs to replace the ones that had passed on) and what hadn’t (the basement swimming pool, the weird upstairs room planked with logs so that it looks like the inside of a log cabin).

“When I was a kid, I thought this was the best place in the world,” he said, beaming and shaking his head, “and now it seems even better to me.”

Ms. McCormick and Anne Gordon (who still has a folder of poems and stories that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire wrote for the club newspaper when he was 10 or 11) engineered an early break by helping him win a scholarship to Milton Academy, the prep school south of Boston, awarded by the Boston Boys and Girls Clubs every six years. The scholarship had typically gone to an athlete, Ms. Gordon explained, and though Mr. Lindsay-Abaire didn’t know it at the time, she and Ms. McCormick lobbied hard for an exception to be made in his case.

“He was special,” Ms. Gordon said. “We knew it even then.”

It was at Milton that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire began acting and writing plays, and indirectly the school also helped inspire his new play. “Good People” is about social class, a subject that American theater for some reason seems to explore much less often than race. It’s the story of Margaret Walsh, a jobless, smart-mouthed single mother from Southie, who barges into the life and home of an old high school boyfriend who escaped from the neighborhood, became a doctor and now lives in the swanky suburb of Chestnut Hill.

“Class is something I know about,” Mr. Lindsay-Abaire said. “I’ve lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity.”

He recalled that on school vacations he would go home and watch TV for a week while seemingly everyone else at Milton went off somewhere and came back with a tan.

Debbie Simon, who teaches English and public speaking at Milton and was Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s coach on the speech team, said recently: “I’m sure it was foreign to him at first, but he adapted and was embraced by the school in less than a minute. He was remarkable right from the beginning. He wrote a play for his 10th-grade class to put on. That was unheard of at Milton then.

“He was the kind of kid who was always saying: ‘Well, how about if we do this? What do you think?’ His enthusiasm was contagious. This was all a while back, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s cheerful good nature and seeming lack of class anxiety doubtless owe something to his charmed career. He has had five plays produced, all by the Manhattan Theater Club, where he is now a cherished regular on the order of Terrence McNally or John Patrick Shanley. He wrote the book for the musical “High Fidelity” and the book and lyrics for “Shrek the Musical”; he wrote the screenplays for “Inkheart,” “Robots” and themovie version of “Rabbit Hole,” currently in theaters, and is working now with Sam Raimi (director of the “Spider-Man” movies) on a film prequel to “The Wizard of Oz.”

But people who know Mr. Lindsay-Abaire also remark all the time about how kind he is.

“He has a personal generosity in him that also pervades his work,” said Daniel Sullivan, the director of “Good People” and the stage version of “Rabbit Hole.” “There aren’t bad people in this play. He has such affection for the world he grew up in, and he sees every point of view.”

Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s early work is often compared to Christopher Durang’s, not inappropriately, even if his plays aren’t as angry or scabrous. The first play he ever acted in was Mr. Durang’s “History of the American Film,” and Mr. Durang and the playwright Marsha Norman taught Mr. Lindsay-Abaire at Juilliard, where he went after graduating from Sarah Lawrence. You can see the Durang influence, as well as a Southie streak, in the way Mr. Lindsay-Abaire combines whimsy, farce and black comedy. “Fuddy Meers,” his first play, was about an amnesiac whose memory is erased every time she goes to sleep. “Kimberly Akimbo,” his third, was about a teenage girl with a progeria-like disease that causes her to age and waste away.

“Rabbit Hole,” on other hand, about a married couple grieving over the death of their young son, is written in the style of old-fashioned realism. Tate Donovan, who plays the doctor in “Good People,” also appeared in a Los Angeles production of “Rabbit Hole” and recalled recently that when he read the script, he said to himself: “Is this the same dude who wrote ‘Fuddy Meers’? No way.”

“Rabbit Hole” was a conscious departure, according Mr. Lindsay-Abaire.

“I wanted to see if I could write a naturalistic play,” he said. “I’ve been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn’t like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays. So a bitter, angry part of me was saying I could write one of those damn plays if I wanted to.”

The idea for “Rabbit Hole” didn’t come to him until years later, however, when, himself the father of a young son, he began hearing stories about parents who had lost children.

“I remembered something Marsha Norman said at Juilliard,” he said. “She said, if you want to write a good play, write about the thing that frightens you the most.”

Mr. Lindsay-Abaire hasn’t ruled out returning to his old mode, and even has an absurdist play in mind. But “Good People” had to be done in realistic style, he went on, because he didn’t want to make his characters ridiculous.

“I don’t want to be didactic about class,” he said. “I thought, Let me write about the people I know and love and class will bubble up inevitably.”

Comparing himself to Mike, the doctor character in “Good People,” who is ambivalent about his Southie origins, proud of them in a way but also dismissive of those who didn’t get an education and move out, he said: “I’m a lot less conflicted. I’ve worked really hard, but I know people who have worked even harder but didn’t have the chances I’ve had.

“We have this myth that if you work hard, you can accomplish anything. It’s not a very American thing to say, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s true for a lot of people, but you need other things to succeed. You need luck, you need opportunity, and you need the life skills to recognize what an opportunity is.”