THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME
That in-between stage is the one Lynda Barry cleverly re-creates in The Good Times Are Killing Me. She acts as a go-between, a medium, putting us in contact with long-dead childhood experiences. Arnold Aprill, who has adapted Barry’s novel for the City Lit Theater, manages to make these vaporous experiences materialize onstage. But he goes a step farther in his direction of the play–we see the glorious eccentricity and goofy humor that shape Barry’s vision of childhood.
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Barry is best known as a cartoonist, but “cartoonist” may be a misnomer. “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” carried every week in the Reader and about four dozen other papers, is actually a meditation on childhood, when kids are capable of observing but not yet very good at analyzing and judging. She’ll recall “bad children,” for example, the ones who “would just sock you for no reason and yell swears at anyone, even their own parents.” Or the “Slobbergirl,” so named because “you could make her so mad that her face would get red, big lines would come out on her neck, and drool would occur.”
The Good Times Are Killing Me is not a collection of comic strips, however, but a novel. It’s a series of brief vignettes, the childhood autobiography of Edna Arkins, a girl growing up with her sister and divorced mother in a declining neighborhood. “I can remember [when] the houses went White, White, White, Japanese, White, White,” Edna says. “Down Crowley was where all the Negro houses started.”
For the leads, Aprill has selected actresses whose physical appearance alone makes them ideal for their roles. As Bonna, baby-faced Glenda Starr Kelley is sassy and aggressive, always ready to fight for her self-respect. But when she’s finally accepted by Edna, Kelley becomes a trusting little girl, full of sweet exuberance.
