Stirring the Pot

“Good Thing,” the startling new play from Brooklyn transplant Jessica Goldberg, is a tale of two kitchens.

Bouncing off the stage-left walls at the Actors’ Gang in Hollywood are “the kids,” as Goldberg calls them: a man with a dead-end job who’s tempted by a old high school flame while his pregnant wife and younger brother bond over a ruinous fondness for methamphetamine. The stage-right kitchen belongs to “the adults”--a guidance counselor and his wife, mired in a childless 20-year marriage recently frayed by adultery and alcoholism. In Act 2, generations collide, families fracture, and at least one good thing does indeed emerge from the wreckage.

The Taper, Too production of “Good Thing,” which runs through next Saturday, marks Goldberg’s first fully staged production in Los Angeles.

Hovering over the stove of her own kitchen, a cozy 1940s-era black-and-white tile nook in the corner of a hilltop Silver Lake bungalow, Goldberg, 28, makes a pot of tea and ponders which set of characters she feels closer to. “Definitely, there are times I really want to be a kid, but I have a very mature life; I take my work really seriously. I guess I’m somewhere in the middle.”

“Good Thing” tackles big issues like drug abuse, fidelity and family dysfunction, but Goldberg had modest aims when she started writing the play in Brooklyn two years ago. “My work is really about people I know and whatever themes come out of those people come out. I just had these people that I wanted to give voices to--people I grew up with, or parts of me.”

One of the most striking voices in the play belongs to Bobby (John Cabrera), the zoned-out addict who explains his need for “speed.” “My thoughts are crystal-clear now, my thoughts are pure, my thoughts are like water, I can see ‘em, they make sense, I can hold ‘em in my mouth. . . . Instead of this dirt in my head, this trash, this confusion, this bumble, bumble of stupid words.”

It’s a mentality Goldberg understands intimately, having witnessed drug addiction among her own friends. “Substance abuse--it’s an important subject,” says Goldberg, who has a habit of beginning new sentences before she’s finished old ones. “There’s a need for it. . . . I’m trying to find what it is, somehow. I think that’s why you write, is to try to figure something out, or make it so you can control the other person, so at the end the person can say, ‘Oh, I’ll get help.’ [But] maybe they want to die . . . because some people do kick it.”

The slice of druggie life depicted in her play does not always ring a bell of recognition with audiences--even those who should know better. “What’s so interesting to me,” Goldberg says, “is this thing that happens where people watch [my plays], like, through glass and go, ‘Oh, this is terribly sad. . . . Do kids really do that?’ ”

Goldberg spent months allowing her “Good Thing” characters to emerge, but the key story turn that cracked open the play came to her in a flash. “That’s one of those moments, when you’re sitting there, it’s so exciting, so thrilling to figure out that piece of the puzzle.”

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Goldberg grew up in Woodstock, N.Y., where her parents literally ran mom-and-pop record stores--each had a shop. In the rural upstate enclave of musicians, artists and ex-hippies, Goldberg muses, “It’s like all those ‘60s people who were the adults we had around [at Woodstock], they embraced this kind of freedom. I grew up with all the kids from the Band. And then Richard Manuel committed suicide when we were all, like, in seventh grade. It was a lot of drugs, and it was always kind of strange because they were sort of like celebrities, sort of romantic. So there was always that line between what is passionate and what is meaningful, between stability and wanting to be wild.”

Goldberg graduated from high school in 1990 and worked in a video store for a year, then began a five-year master’s program at New York University. There, she discovered her metier. “I didn’t realize it was possible to write a play. I’d always wanted to write fiction but was never really good at prose.”

Inspired by Maria Irene Fornes and Caryl Churchill’s “toughness,” David Mamet’s dialogue and Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child,” Goldberg felt especially drawn to the work of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. “I totally steal from Chekhov,” she says. “I just love his stories.”

Favoring small-scale dysfunction over high concept, Goldberg succinctly dismisses her one attempt at allegory, 1999’s “The Hologram Theory.” “That was a disaster. I tried to really be ambitious, and I was trying to write a big piece based on a true story about some kids in New York City who killed their friend. It had too many characters--this girl comes to New York and tries to collect her brother’s body parts, like to make peace in the universe so his ghost could rest, because the kids had chopped him up. It was a hard thing to do. So I tried a little bit there to do something allegorical, but, um, I personally get really moved by people . . . things about people.”

After earning a master’s in dramatic writing in 1996 from NYU, Goldberg spent two years in Juilliard’s playwriting program. One of her student pieces caught the eye of Robert Egan, producing director for the Mark Taper Forum, who invited her to take part in the theater’s 1998 New Work Festival. “What we got from Jessica,” Egan recalls, “was smart and fresh and alive and kind of anarchic, and really exploring to me moral issues in a very edgy yet entertaining way like I had not seen many young writers doing. So we flew her out for a reading, and when we met her, we knew she was the real thing.”

Back in Brooklyn, Goldberg began dating actor Hamish Linklater after he auditioned for one of her plays. When Linklater landed a role in the ABC drama “Gideon’s Crossing” in the spring of 2000, the couple moved to Los Angeles. Goldberg checked in with her contacts at the Taper and brought them her “Good Thing” script. A staged reading at fall’s New Work Festival led to its Taper, Too debut at the Actors’ Gang, which included Linklater in the role of big brother Dean.

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“Gideon’s Crossing,” the good thing that brought Goldberg West, has been canceled, but she’s in no hurry to move back East. Showing off her writing desk, which overlooks a hammock and the garden that Linklater recently planted, Goldberg marvels at how hospitable Los Angeles has been.

“I never thought I’d leave the East Coast, but for me it’s actually been wonderful, it’s really helped me. I love writing here. . . .

“I also think, strangely enough, it’s very hard to do something a little different in New York. There’s an accepted group of male playwrights--I don’t want to sound too political or anything--they do their plays every year, they’re very loved, and they’re at the big theaters.”

Also making Goldberg feel at home is a monthly writers’ group and a couple of female playwrights she can talk shop with. “It’s nice that there a couple of playwrights here--Annie Weisman and Bridget Carpenter--so when you need someone to talk about your process, you have somebody.”

Next up for Goldberg: a commission from the Atlantic Theater Company, the New York-based ensemble founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy. Has she started the play? “I have, but I don’t know what it is yet. It’s very amorphous. It’ll be the first play that explores Jewish . . . my Jewish [background]. . . . I’d never explored it, so I don’t know what it will be yet. Once I start going on it, I’ll think, where is this thing going?”