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Playwright James Ijames: Good Bones, Great Timing

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There are bets that pay off handsomely but predictably, like when a home increases in value over years. Then there are the jackpots you just can’t anticipate, like when a theater hires a promising up-and-comer and—four years and one global pandemic later—finds itself opening a brand-new work from a Pulitzer winner who’s become the toast of the town. Several towns, actually.

When Studio Theatre invited James Ijames to Washington to discuss a commission in the summer of 2019, he was a rising professional-actor-turned-professional-playwright who’d won a number of prestigious awards and fellowships. His show Kill Move Paradise—inspired by the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy holding a toy gun, by a White Cleveland police officer—had been staged at the National Black Theatre in Harlem to strong reviews.

As Good Bones, the play Studio hired him to write opens in D.C., Ijmaes’ comedy Fat Ham is a month into its Broadway run at the American Airlines Theatre. Performances of Fat Ham, a queerer, Blacker, less blood-soaked remix of Hamlet that earned its author the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last year, are scheduled through early August, and the play has been nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best Play. If all that wasn’t enough, Ijames (pronounced like dimes, mins the D) is also working on at least one major TV project he’s not yet at liberty to discuss.

Broadway, shmawdway. TV, shmeevee. Good Bones, the Ijames play making its world premiere in Chocolate City, is set in an unnamed American metropolis where the ever-steepening incline of 21st century capitalism has made it impossible for many working- and middle-class residents, living in the same communities their parents and grandparents did, to attain a comparable standard of living. 

The play could be set in San Francisco, where the tech boom has cooled but the housing costs it drove into the stratosphere have remained. It might be Philadelphia, where the century-old home Ijames shares with his husband in the ethnically diverse Whitman neighborhood has roughly doubled in value since he bought the place in 2011. Or it could be in D.C., where the 1978 opening of the Studio Theatre helped spur a slow but steady redevelopment of the blighted 14th Street NW corridor—which sustained lasting damage in the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. a decade earlier—into a neighborhood that now has high-end fitness studios and artisanal coffee shops. (Whole Foods didn’t arrive on P Street NW until 22 years after Studio opened.) 

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