Good Bones
Written by James Ijames, directed by Saheem Ali, set design by Maruti Evans
The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street
New York
Extended through October 27
A short walk from my apartment, a 17-story housing tower rises up from a sea of two-and three-story apartment buildings. For a long time, its canary-yellow insulation was exposed to passersby, but slowly the facade has come into place, replacing its treacly hues with silver and salmon-colored metal panels. Soon, its green construction shed will come down to make way for a brand-new Burlington Coat Factory.
No matter how many bike lanes with their oddly pungent green paint or beige cafe-by-day-wine-bar-by-night popups might signal rising rents and displacement, perhaps these are mere chromatic harbingers of displacement. The color of gentrification is new-construction gray in Good Bones, a new play by James Ijames on stage at The Public Theater, now through October 27. The play’s title seems to riff off of the HGTV series of the same name, which ran for nine seasons from 2016 through 2024.
The play takes place during a luxe kitchen renovation in an unnamed American city. The context at times feels awfully like New York but could just as easily be San Francisco, Philadelphia, or Washington, D.C. Maruti Evans’s set design references the historic architecture of The Public’s Martinson Theater on Lafayette Street: On stage, he creates a grand home from a similar fin-de-siecle era, but nearly every surface is awash in gray paint. The kitchen could easily have been featured on the HGTV show.
Evans told me he found inspiration from walking around San Francisco, where many of the city’s Victorian pastel houses have been graywashed. “These beautiful colors are all gone, all completely different. And what you don’t see is, of course, all the people that have left, or the parts of those neighborhoods that made them neighborhoods.”
“Let It Sink Into the Earth”
The play’s central couple, homeowners Travis and Aisha, recently moved into the historically Black and systematically disinvested neighborhood where Aisha grew up. Travis is a restauranteur, selling historically Black cuisine at elevated prices. Aisha works in real estate development, meeting with community members to encourage them to support a new stadium project that would tear down public housing and offer questionable “relocation packages.”
They’ve moved into a massive home recalling the brownstones of Harlem or Brooklyn with deep history as the home of a beloved community figure from the early-20th century that later became a hangout for neighborhood kids. These kids included their contractor, Earl, who is excited by the prospect of restoring the space to its former glory.
The kitchen seems to hold special significance for him, as it has for many homeowners and architects throughout history. (FLW’s hearth, anyone?) “If I go to a house party, I inevitably find myself in the kitchen, talking to people. It’s really a powerful space. People gossip in the kitchen. People gather in the kitchen at holidays.” Ijames said. For him, the kitchen—at once a status symbol and a hearth—seemed a perfect space to site the play.
Like Aisha, Earl grew up in the neighborhood, but instead of leaving to work for real estate developers, Earl has remained and contributed to his community, building Little Free Libraries and organizing block parties. (Though his work as a contractor, upselling clients on $40 drawer pulls, also indirectly helps the gentrification process along.) Where Earl sees community solidarity, Aisha sees the violence she experienced as a child. Where Earl sees histories of perseverance, Aisha sees decades of disinvestment and death.
For Earl, the way to repair the wrongs of segregation and ghettoization is to strengthen community relationships. For Aisha, it’s by turning the neighborhood into a blank slate. In the play’s final moments, she says: “I want it gone because all I have ever known it do is take and steal and kill and drain. Let it sink into the earth.” The neighborhood is haunted by the sins of the past—the “bones” in the play’s title might be more than architectural underpinnings.
“Saran-wrapping people and places”
A challenge for set designers on a play like Good Bones is transforming the space throughout a relatively short running time. Kitchen remodels can take weeks or even months, but in this play, the work has to take place within two hours. In addition to the prefabricated cabinets that Evans sourced from IKEA (another central player in gentrification-core aesthetics) he employs plastic sheeting to obscure parts of the set: sheets slowly are removed throughout to play to reveal more gray cabinetry and appliances.
Evans referred to the plastic sheeting, a disposable product designed to insulate people from the mess of construction, as “the ultimate capitalist material, Saran-wrapping people and places.” The sheeting also serves as a persistent reminder of the kitchen’s unfinished state. Evans remarked on the uncomfortable feeling of living amid this uncertainty: “It’s dusty with gross plastic everywhere, and your family hates you because there’s plastic everywhere.”
But in the play’s final scene, the enormous, glorious kitchen has come fully into view. In one moment, Aisha climbs onto the counter and looks dwarfed by the scale of the cabinetry. (Evans remarked that to contend with the scale of the theater space, he had to look beyond the small brownstone kitchens of New York City to cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco where much larger kitchens are realistic.)
Just as the full extent of the kitchen’s gray design comes into focus, so too does the full extent of the harms of both disinvestment and gentrification. The neighborhood has suffered decades of segregation and insufficient public services, and the families that live there are dealing with the consequences. But a large megaproject moving in and displacing residents doesn’t seem to offer much hope for a more equitable future.
While a previous production of Good Bones in Washington, D.C.’s ending scene jumped three years ahead to show audiences a joyful future where everything worked out, this one features an entirely new ending that offers no easy solutions, leaving its characters sorting through gentrification’s moral gray muck.
Kevin Ritter-Jung is a researcher and writer in Queens, New York. He is the managing editor of Urban Omnibus.
