Kirsten Greenidge’s play Luck of the Irish at LCT3 takes the single family house as a lens through which to examine race and class. Its story begins in the 1950’s, when an Irish American handyman “ghost buys" a house for an African American doctor and his family in a posh suburb of Boston. The play’s writing is admirably even-handed, exploring each character’s point of view. The play's set, designed by Mimi Lien, is at once incredibly suggestive and incredibly elegant. It gives us the house itself, a clapboard colonial with a pitched roof and brick chimney, as a full-size clear plexiglass cut-out at the back of the stage, tethered to the ceiling with wires. This ghost-bought house is appropriately spectral, more of an idea than a thing. The house’s back yard is expressed as a stretch of artificial turf that covers the entire stage, spilling over its front edge to the floor below. Its sumptuous texture and crazy green color are indelible; they overwhelm the house itself and all the other furniture on stage.
None of the characters seems entirely happy about the house. The handyman’s wife is resentful she can’t live in a home this grand ("This is not the order of things – I got passed over.”) and the doctor is disappointed that the house doesn’t bring him satisfaction (“I don’t feel lifted.) The handyman and the doctor’s wife, however, kindred spirits, are drawn more powerfully to the land than the house. The doctor’s wife rushes through her chores each morning to spend her afternoons lounging dreamily in the back yard. One day the handyman meets her here and observes that the grass "curls up to your toes like the sea." The house promises stability and status while the lawn promises freedom, both physical and imaginative. It’s a tribute to the play that, at the end, we’re not sure what matters most.