Feeling the pain of 'Good People'

David Lindsay-Abaire calls his new play, simply, "Good People." Like everything in this deceptively amiable, stealthily gripping tragicomedy, however, the words are less plain than they first let on.

On one level, this is a straightforward class-collision story about a woman stuck struggling in the old South Boston neighborhood and a man, her old boyfriend, who made it out. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ("Rabbit Hole"), along with director Daniel Sullivan and a splendid six-actor cast, keeps finding the sting that happens when salt-of-the-earth sentimentality rubs on the real bruises of life.

The heart and center is Frances McDormand - a rigorous stage presence as well as the irresistible muse of "Fargo" and related Coen brothers movies. As Margaret, an unemployed cashier with a severely disabled grown daughter, the actress once again turns a kaleidoscopically honest lack of pretense into something both breezy and exquisite. Rooted in pride, naked with envy and desperate for work, Margaret looks up her former flame (Tate Donovan), a doctor with an upscale black wife (Renee Elise Goldsberry) and a sharp, self-loathing defensiveness about having become "lace-curtain Irish."

Nobody is spared - with condescension toward no one - in this multi-scene tale of two Bostons, each neatly established with telling detail by designer John Lee Beatty. Well, Estelle Parsons does overanimate the eccentricity a bit as Margaret's self-involved landlady, but the caricature functions as a comic grace note to lull us into expecting blue-collar cartoons.

The plot leads toward a revelation, of sorts, but all kinds of tiny bombs are exploded along the way.

Like "Rabbit Hole," "Good People" continues the playwright's naturalistic journey away from the imaginative, but increasingly tiresome absurdity that began at Manhattan Theatre Club in 1999 with the Gothic-outlaw-nightmare farce "Fuddy Meers."

Unlike "Rabbit Hole," which I found a glum domestic melodrama, "Good People" finds ways to fold Lindsay-Abaire's lovely nutty side into the pain.

The play also makes clear that Lindsay-Abaire has given major and lesser-known actresses some of the most intelligent, unconventional women characters in the theater today. The ones here may be good people, but they're nobody's fools.