THE STORY: GOOD THING brings us into the households of John and Nancy Roy, forty-something high-school guidance counselors whose marriage has been increasingly on the rocks, in no small part due to John’s infidelity with a student, and Dean and Mary, recent graduates struggling to make their way in life. Mary is pregnant, and while Dean works, his younger brother, Bobby, must guard Mary to ensure that she doesn’t gain access to his stash of drugs and cause irreparable harm to the fetus. The catalyst linking these households is Liz, an Ithaca College dropout who has returned home and is selling shoes. Liz has been in love with Dean since high school and finds herself once again seeking the guidance of John Roy as she decides the best course for her life would be to rekindle her relationship with Dean and for the two of them to begin a new life. It is a decision fraught with peril and consequences. GOOD THING gives lyrical voice to those who are at a loss for direction and desperate for a sense of meaning and fulfillment—in other words, all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time.
“Goldberg weaves her characters together with an assured narrative hand. Each act culminates in emotional fireworks…Yet the characters also have moments of rueful humor and quiet reflection, spoken in language that retains the profane flavor of contemporary speech but occasionally rises to a level of unobtrusive, unassuming lyricism.” —Los Angeles Times.
“…playwright Jessica Goldberg puts forth an ambitiously eclectic aesthetic, a blend of gritty social drama, poetic humor and unsubtle existential contemplation…GOOD THING demonstrates her worthwhile voice in examining lost, angst-ridden or drug-addled people who genuinely wish to improve their lives but don’t know how…With an assured sense of what makes great theater, Goldberg gives her actors plenty of length of tightrope to leap from…” —Variety.
