No Good Things Dwell in the Flesh

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“Inside an unassuming storefront somewhere in Queens is a woman you wouldn’t notice if you saw her on the street … This is Agata, who at 64 is a self-taught tailor with the skill of an artist and an unforgiving eye. When her apprentice, Janice, shows off a photo of her new fiancé, the unevenness of his pant legs is a flagrant red flag. ‘If you’re ignorant on pants, you’ll be ignorant on wife,’ says Agata, a brusque Russian immigrant who married the same man twice by the time she hit 30, divorced him for good, then built an independent life. ‘Why you wanna take care of this loser?’ In Christina Masciotti’s keen and unflashy new play, NO GOOD THINGS DWELL IN THE FLESH … Agata — a survivor whose wariness of men and their havoc is a defining stance … has had only one vacation. So maybe it’s weariness that makes her hope that the talented but unserious Janice — a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who already has a business degree — could be a worthy successor, someone Agata might simply give her thriving business to. NO GOOD THINGS is interested in what it means to lose a business that has quietly woven itself into the fabric of a neighborhood. That’s a resonant concern these days, as so many urban storefronts sit vacant. [Masciotti] is also characteristically drawn here to the richness of language, Agata’s in particular. As when she tells Janice, ‘The heart shape is kind of my enemy shape.’ Or when she orders Vlad … the handsome but unstable ex who tracks Agata down: ‘Stop creating all this situation.’ … Agata, who cares about him still, wants only to keep her distance from him, and from men in general … That’s another thing this play is about … the siren song of men and coupledom. Agata has spent her whole adult life trying not to get shipwrecked on those rocks.” —Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times

“As a woman with piles of hard-earned experience, and as an immigrant and a service worker who has frequently been looked right through, Agata has plenty to say, and Masciotti skillfully renders her distinctive way of saying it. I sometimes found myself thinking of Alex, the criminally charming translator who narrates Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. The novel’s vitality comes from Alex’s voice, with its buoyancy and confidence, its slightly jangly English and wonky figures of speech. Agata would no doubt class Alex as she does ‘taller men’ — ‘more stupid. Certain amount proud of themself. For nothing.’ —but her own particular idiom is likewise the bedrock and the delight of her author’s story … It brings Masciotti back to her happy place — the detailed observation of character.” —New York Magazine/Vulture

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