Edna And Bonna And Lynda

“The Good Times Are Killing Me” - Barry calls it a “feel-good tragedy or a feel-good comedy” - has been a surprise off-Broadway hit. Her story of a doomed friendship between two preadolescent girls in the mid-60s, white Edna Arkins and black Bonna Willis, is set in the working-class Seattle neighborhood where Barry grew up and where her mother still lives. “Good Times” began as a novel published in 1988 by Seattle’s Real Comet Press. (The novel, in turn, began as the introduction to a catalog of Barry’s paintings of musicians from Roy Acuff to James Brown; how that got out of hand is another story.) After a Chicago company did a staged reading, New York’s small Second Stage Theatre suggested she make the novel into a full-fledged play. Following a well-received three-month run at the 108-seat Second Stage, “Good Times” reopened last week at Greenwich Village’s 379-seat Minetta Lane Theatre. And now Norman Jewison (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “Moonstruck”) plans to direct a film version. Script by screenwriter Lynda Barry.

Why so much fuss about a play that’s still not fully dramatized, and whose hoary bag of tricks includes the company chanting “Fight, fight, fight” as the two girls work up to the audible, clumsily screened slap that breaks their friendship? Partly it’s the versatile, energetic cast (they all sing, and most play dual roles), especially 14-year-old Angela Goethals, who holds the evening together as Edna, and 21-year-old Chandra Wilson, who plays the shyly affectionate, defensively belligerent Bonna with utter conviction. Partly, too, it may be all the sure-fire laughs at easy targets, like Girl Scouts and uptight white folks. Or perhaps it’s Edna’s beloved rock-n-roll oldies, Everyboomer’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleines. “Do you ever wonder,” she asks the audience as the play begins, “….why just hearing a certain song can make a whole entire time of your life suddenly just rise up and stick in your brain?”

But more importantly, Barry taps into one of America’s central anxieties: that the interracial utopia imagined in the ’60s was an illusion. “I think it’s too late,” says Barry flatly. “In terms of this country ever being able to mend the rift, I think that’s impossible. And that’s sort of the message of my play.” The final tableau, in which Edna and Bonna stand silently side by side, almost a quiver with suppressed anger– and more deeply suppressed love–induces a discomfort that’s not quite dispelled by a closing hymn (“Uncloudy Day”). It’s not even softened much by the reflection that, after all, we’ve been watching a spirited, harmoniously functioning interracial ensemble. That sort of discomfort makes up for a lot of too-cozy satire.

How to translate “Good Times” into film is another question–one Barry won’t be able to answer until she begins the screenplay this winter. She’s never done one of those before, either. (I’m pretty sure we won’t have anybody speaking into the camera," she says.) Meanwhile, she’s writing a new novel, about Edna in junior-high school, as well as her radio commentaries (“a lot of childhood stuff”) and her weekly comic strip, which remains at least as edgy as her play. (This summer her characters Maybonne and Marlys discovered their uncle is gay. “Personally I like queers!!!” Marlys proclaims. “So far I only know two queers and I’m looking for more queers!!!”) Exhausting? Business as usual. As Barry recalls it, her creative life got pointed in it’s current direction back when a college painting teacher (who also taught writing) urged the class “to go back into childhood and learn how to tell the story of our lives in a hundred different ways.” Typically, she took it to heart.

title: “Edna And Bonna And Lynda” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Joshua Corning”

“The Good Times Are Killing Me” - Barry calls it a “feel-good tragedy or a feel-good comedy” - has been a surprise off-Broadway hit. Her story of a doomed friendship between two preadolescent girls in the mid-60s, white Edna Arkins and black Bonna Willis, is set in the working-class Seattle neighborhood where Barry grew up and where her mother still lives. “Good Times” began as a novel published in 1988 by Seattle’s Real Comet Press. (The novel, in turn, began as the introduction to a catalog of Barry’s paintings of musicians from Roy Acuff to James Brown; how that got out of hand is another story.) After a Chicago company did a staged reading, New York’s small Second Stage Theatre suggested she make the novel into a full-fledged play. Following a well-received three-month run at the 108-seat Second Stage, “Good Times” reopened last week at Greenwich Village’s 379-seat Minetta Lane Theatre. And now Norman Jewison (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “Moonstruck”) plans to direct a film version. Script by screenwriter Lynda Barry.

Why so much fuss about a play that’s still not fully dramatized, and whose hoary bag of tricks includes the company chanting “Fight, fight, fight” as the two girls work up to the audible, clumsily screened slap that breaks their friendship? Partly it’s the versatile, energetic cast (they all sing, and most play dual roles), especially 14-year-old Angela Goethals, who holds the evening together as Edna, and 21-year-old Chandra Wilson, who plays the shyly affectionate, defensively belligerent Bonna with utter conviction. Partly, too, it may be all the sure-fire laughs at easy targets, like Girl Scouts and uptight white folks. Or perhaps it’s Edna’s beloved rock-n-roll oldies, Everyboomer’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleines. “Do you ever wonder,” she asks the audience as the play begins, “….why just hearing a certain song can make a whole entire time of your life suddenly just rise up and stick in your brain?”

But more importantly, Barry taps into one of America’s central anxieties: that the interracial utopia imagined in the ’60s was an illusion. “I think it’s too late,” says Barry flatly. “In terms of this country ever being able to mend the rift, I think that’s impossible. And that’s sort of the message of my play.” The final tableau, in which Edna and Bonna stand silently side by side, almost a quiver with suppressed anger– and more deeply suppressed love–induces a discomfort that’s not quite dispelled by a closing hymn (“Uncloudy Day”). It’s not even softened much by the reflection that, after all, we’ve been watching a spirited, harmoniously functioning interracial ensemble. That sort of discomfort makes up for a lot of too-cozy satire.

How to translate “Good Times” into film is another question–one Barry won’t be able to answer until she begins the screenplay this winter. She’s never done one of those before, either. (I’m pretty sure we won’t have anybody speaking into the camera," she says.) Meanwhile, she’s writing a new novel, about Edna in junior-high school, as well as her radio commentaries (“a lot of childhood stuff”) and her weekly comic strip, which remains at least as edgy as her play. (This summer her characters Maybonne and Marlys discovered their uncle is gay. “Personally I like queers!!!” Marlys proclaims. “So far I only know two queers and I’m looking for more queers!!!”) Exhausting? Business as usual. As Barry recalls it, her creative life got pointed in it’s current direction back when a college painting teacher (who also taught writing) urged the class “to go back into childhood and learn how to tell the story of our lives in a hundred different ways.” Typically, she took it to heart.