School opened up a class conflict for David Lindsay-Abaire

Reporting from New York —

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire says he never enjoyed bingo, though it was his mother’s weekly ritual in their South Boston, or “Southie,” neighborhood. He liked going to the racetrack with his working-class father even less.

“But these were the things that you could attach hope to,” he says, “and that’s pretty much what everybody in the neighborhood did.”

Hoping the bingo ball will pop their way is certainly what the darkly humorous characters do in “Good People,” Lindsay-Abaire’s Broadway drama, which returns the Pulitzer-winning playwright (“Rabbit Hole”) to his blue-collar roots.

Yet when Margie Walsh, played by Oscar winner Frances McDormand, loses her job as a dollar-store cashier, she is forced to rely on more than just the luck of the draw. Destitute but responsible for a mentally handicapped adult child, she seeks out Mikey Dillon (Tate Donovan), a high school beau who is now a rich, socially connected doctor. Margie’s just looking for a job, but the reunion brings on an explosive clash of class and culture.

Scott Brown, writing in New York magazine, called Margie “the richest, most fabulously flawed character yet” in the Lindsay-Abaire canon and praised the play for unsentimentally tackling an issue rarely seen on the Broadway stage: class conflict in the U.S.

As a writer who made his reputation with the absurdist comedies “Fuddy Meers” and “Kimberly Akimbo” as well as the musicals “High Fidelity” and “Shrek!,” Lindsay-Abaire might seem an unlikely candidate to probe America’s social darkness. But “Good People” has what Lindsay-Abaire says typifies his work: “outsiders in search of clarity.”

“David’s portrait of humanity is so clear-eyed, he really nails us,” says Lynne Meadow, artistic director of Manhattan Theatre Club, which has produced six of his plays. “Yet at the same time, he is so versatile, true and funny. He has a real affection for his characters.”

Manhattan Theatre Club’s investment in Lindsay-Abaire has paid off yet again with a Tony nomination this season for best play as well as a nod for Frances McDormand as leading actress in a play. This is his third time at the altar with Tony, having been nominated previously for “Shrek” and for the MTC-produced “Rabbit Hole.” He’ll go to the Tonys on June 12 with hope and resignation.

“I’ve lost to a Brit every time,” he says philosophically, referring to the musical “Billy Elliot” and the drama “History Boys” while acknowledging the stiff competition this year from “War Horse,” a transfer from London’s West End. (“Jerusalem,” also a London import, and “The Mother… With the Hat” by American Stephen Adly Guirgis round out the best play category.)

But, adds Lindsay-Abaire, “It’s nice to be on the list, and I especially love that Southie is represented. That means a lot.”

Indeed, sitting in a Midtown conference room, the 41-year-old playwright recalls with quiet charm and wry humor growing up on a trajectory not unlike that of Margie and her ilk. That is, until the bright 11-year-old “Bearzo,” as he was called then, was awarded a scholarship to Milton Academy, a bastion of Boston’s affluent, privileged elite. No one in his extended family had ever graduated from college, much less a private school. His father, known as “Bugsy,” sold fruit out of a back of a beaten-up old van; his mother, Sally, worked in a factory. His parents were as perplexed at the change in their son’s fortunes as he was.

“The school was seven miles away from Southie, but it may as well have been a thousand,” he says of the neighborhood that has figured in movies such as “The Town” and “The Departed.” “You so want to fit in, to feel ‘normal,’ so I was scared both for them and for myself. Maybe it was a fear of embarrassment, but I also did not want them to feel badly, pressed upon by class. From the beginning, I was not too eager to reveal where I came from.”

That was less from the fear of being perceived as poor as being perceived as a racist. South Boston, after all, had been the epicenter of the protests against forced-busing to integrate schools in the 1970s Although race is part of the fabric of “Good People” — Mikey is married to a beautiful African American socialite — the play centers on the widening gulf between classes.

Within his first few months at Milton, the playwright learned firsthand the same insecurities that would plague Margie as she assails Mikey, first in his office, then in his home after she invites herself to a birthday party being thrown for him by his wife.

Recalls Lindsay-Abaire, “I was walking across the campus early on and somebody yelled, ‘Hey, Fonzie! Yeah, you! You’re the one who wore that black satin jacket.’ And I remembered that earlier that summer, I had carefully picked out this jacket that I loved — ‘I’ll wear this one to Milton’ — and now this guy was sticking it against me. The stupidest stuff. But when you’re 11, it’s devastating!”

Though Lindsay-Abaire would eventually become popular as “the funny guy” who wrote the class plays, he almost quit Milton three weeks in over another trauma. The episode involved the loss of his Spanish book. His full scholarship had not included textbooks, the purchase of which represented an extravagant outlay for his parents.

“I had this breakdown over it, I literally cried, and I told my parents, ‘I’m outta here, I don’t belong here, it’s not working out,’” Lindsay-Abaire says. “And my father said, ‘Give it another week.’ Which was so uncharacteristic of him. I would’ve expected him to say, ‘To hell with them, You’ll go to Southie High, that’s what we know, that’s what you’ll do.’ But he probably figured we’d invested so much time and energy. And the books were paid for!”

His experiences at Milton would reinforce Lindsay-Abaire’s cosmic view of the world: that luck is as much a part of people’s lives as the ability to recognize opportunity and take advantage of it. But as “Good People” demonstrates, the biggest divide may not be between the lucky and unlucky, the poor and rich, black and white, but between those who are cared for and those who are not.

In one of the play’s most poignant scenes, a bereft Margie says to Mikey, “I never had anyone watching from a window for me,” referring to a parental intervention that prevented her former beau’s star-kissed future from being derailed.

Like Mikey Lindsay-Abaire said he had loving parents “looking out the window” as he played kick the can with pals on Southie’s tough streets. And after he started classes at Milton, his father drove his rusty old van to pick up his son, often arriving more than an hour early. “He was afraid for me all the time,” recalls the playwright. “And it would make me so angry as a kid because it was so smothering. And it’s just this fear that can prevent you from getting out of the neighborhood.”

Yet Lindsay-Abaire admits that now that he is a father of two young boys, he is just like Bugsy. “It drives my wife crazy!” he says of Christine Lindsay, whom he met at their alma mater, Sarah Lawrence. “I’m always wanting to know where my son is. Maybe it’s controlling, but it’s also out of love and protection.”

Lindsay-Abaire says that fatherhood was what made him face, through “Rabbit Hole,” his most profound fear: losing a child. At the same time, his children are an inspiration of sorts for the two films he is working on, “Oz, the Great and Powerful,” director Sam Raimi’s prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” which stars James Franco as a selfish carnival con man who learns to be selfless; and “The Rise of the Guardians,” an animated DreamWorks feature “about the bogeymen taking over the world and the fight between good and evil, hope versus despair.”

“My children are much better lights to the world than either my films or plays,” he says, self-deprecatingly. “But I hope that my work gives people something that they didn’t have before they walked in. Usually it’s a headache. But I hope it’s also something good.”

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