Getting to GOOD

Getting to GOOD

by James McLindon 

New Voices @ New Rep Playwrighting Fellow

Like most of my plays, this one had several separate origins that eventually coalesced into the story that GOOD tries to tell.  (The play is called GOOD this week; it’s had several previous names and may have a few more before I settle on one.) 

I’ve been puzzled by the rash of stories over the last several years of people in the public eye who padded their resumes and got caught: puzzled both by the fact that they thought they could get away with it and the fact that they often did for so long.  I’ve similarly been intrigued by less frequent but persistent stories of people who manage to fake their way into prestigious colleges and grad schools, sometimes by forging transcripts and recommendations letters, but sometimes simply by showing up, attending classes and telling anyone who asks that they were a late admission for whom the paperwork has yet to catch up. Finally, I’ve been astonished to read stories about journalists who make up people about whom they write and for whose stories they even win journalism awards.

At the same time, I live in a college town and have heard from friends of mine on the faculty of various colleges about the various forms of cheating that they encounter, the services that offer term papers to order for sale on-line or in person, and the types of students who use these services: those who have money and are lazy, those who struggle academically, and those for whom English is not their first language. The countermeasures were equally intriguing: software programs that purport to detect plagiarism in the papers that they scan.

All of this got me pondering about how someone who does something like this – resume padding, term paper buying, etc. – justifies this sort of action in her head. I started with the premise that it is the rare person who admits to himself that he is doing wrong; I think people have a remarkable capacity for justifying their actions, or at least their intentions, to themselves. In addition, outside forces make it easier for us today to hold ourselves to less exalted standards. The world in this respect has changed tremendously in the post-Viet Nam/Watergate/Iran-Contra/Monica Lewinsky/Iraq world. The most casual comparison between the world of Mad Men, for example, and our world shows one how much credibility our institutions – the government, the press, and organized religion to name a few– have lost. I don’t think we’re less moral; immorality is just far more visible now than it was, which I think makes it easier for people to justify brief vacations from morality, especially when they believe their goals are good.

This is the moral world of GOOD, as much its world as the college town in which the play is set. I began researching the play last winter, and then completed a draft a few months ago.  Prior to working on it with the New Rep this fall, I let the piece lie fallow for a while so that I could come back to it with fresh eyes.  In October, I got to hear the first act of the play out loud, read by professional actors, which was a tremendous help in and of itself, and then got a lot of very helpful feedback from my fellow Fellows, Bridget and the actors.

Since then, I have rewritten both acts and am looking forward to hearing the second act next week at our December meeting. It’s been a great process so far: the meetings are close enough together to make the sessions feel like a continuing process rather than disjointed, and yet far enough apart to permit unhurried rethinking and rewriting. At the same time, following the progress of the other Fellows’ plays has also been helpful, albeit indirectly, to my writing. I always feel like I learn something useful from watching other writers and their processes, and New Voices has been no exception.