Téa Guarino, Khris Davis, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Mamoudou Athie Photo by Joan Marcus

After winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for his smart, raucous, and very funny Fat Ham, Ijames has switched gears to a more academic approach. Not a lot of laughs in Good Bones, which tackles the complicated issue of gentrification and turns it into a kind of debate over the pros and cons, leaving us to choose sides.

Good Bones is a four-character play, but two of the participants really have little to do but watch and react as the other pair locks horns. In one corner we have Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), an indefatigable businesswoman who, with her husband Travis (Mamoudou Athie), has recently returned to the neighborhood of her youth, an area of an unnamed city that is in the process of undergoing urban renewal. Her current job is to sell the residents and business owners on a proposal for a new sports complex to be built there.

The play unfolds in the kitchen of the old house the couple has purchased. It is in the final stages of being remodeled. At the start, see-through plastic sheeting covers much of the area, but gradually it is dropped for the grand reveal. That sheeting, some strange and intrusive noises and incidents, and the monochromatic gray of Maruti Evan's sterile set design suggest there may be something of a haunted house tale going on. But except in a most peripheral way, this aspect is barely touched upon. Which is unfortunate, because based on what little we learn of the home's history, there is a good ghost story to be had here.

Enter onto the scene the person who will be Aisha's debate opponent, Earl (Khris Davis), who has been remodeling the kitchen for the couple and who, we learn, grew up in similar circumstances to those of Aisha, in the very public housing complex that stands in the way of the proposed sports complex.

Aisha speaks of having joined the world of the upwardly mobile, and of having lived and worked in places like Seattle and Los Angeles and Colorado before returning to the old neighborhood. Her memories of growing up here are filled with scenes of danger and violence and of being frightened all the time. Now it is a place she feels the responsibility to help "heal." But for Earl, who has never left, it was and is home, a rich community made up of places and people he loves. When Aisha enthusiastically shows him the model of the proposed sports complex and touts its benefits, he says it looks like a "death star." And so it goes, an argument that continues without resolution.

To be sure, both Aisha and Earl want to be part of the solution, but neither has the "right" answer. And the truth is, there are no "right" answers to the questions that arise when a long-established neighborhood slides into serious poverty and its concomitant problems.

Unfortunately, Good Bones offers no solutions of its own, but leaves the question hanging. That's effective for a point/counterpoint debate, perhaps, but not necessarily for a play of this nature. The subject of gentrification has been dealt with in numerous plays. What makes them work is that while they don't necessarily offer magical solutions, they do give us decisions, actions, and consequences. That's the drama that is missing here.

James Ijames is certainly an excellent writer, and he is able to create interesting characters, including the fourth one in this play, Earl's younger sister Carmen (Téa Guarino), a student at the University of Pennsylvania whose future will most likely cut or at least loosen her ties to the neighborhood. All of the participants in the play are free to argue until the cows come home, but none will be harmed by either the building of the sports complex or the failure to do so. No one here is wrestling with what it means to be struggling to make ends meet or to dodge gangs, drug dealers, or others who might harm them. Instead, they are arguing on behalf of people who are given no voice in this play.

As it currently stands, Good Bones shows us only its own good bones, something that is reinforced by Saheem Ali's direction, which offers up a slow pacing and empty moments in what seems to be a very large space for an intimate production. We are left hungry for more. We want to know about the history of the house in which the play takes place. We want to know the extent to which Aisha, a Black woman, actually is an integral member of the corporation behind her work, or whether she is merely being used as the likeliest person to be the liaison with the Black community. We'd also like to get a better sense of Travis and Aisha's marriage, given that he was born into a wealthy family while she has roots in the place she has brought him to. Does that class distinction matter? If not, why bring it up? All these questions are raised and then, frustratingly, abandoned. Mark this one "Incomplete."