I can see the appeal of staging CP Taylor’s GOOD (@ New Rep
through Oct. 30th) right now. Alas, the comparison of our election
campaigning to the rhetoric of Nazi Germany’s rise isn’t that far fetched. Mr.
Trump’s supporters say he doesn’t really mean the racist ideas he spouts: It’s
just to attract the conservative base. In GOOD, a Jewish character reassures
himself that “they’ll drop the Jewish persecution once they have the vote.” Of
course we don’t know what Trump really believes but we do know what the Nazis
wrought on six million Jews after they got the vote.
GOOD’s protagonist, a university professor (Michael Kaye),
tells the audience that music always seems to accompany “the dramatic moments”
in his life. In truth, the moments are far more dramatic to the people he’s
watching or disappointing or condemning to death by his inaction. He
rationalizes book-burning because “learning by living” could be a better method
of teaching. He rationalizes euthanasia as an end to the suffering of those who
have no “quality of life.” He turns a deaf ear to an old friend (Tim Spears)
who needs help getting out of Germany,
dismissing him because he has too many “worries” of his own to see to.
His lyrical “addictions” (bits of pop songs, Beethoven, Bach,
Wagner and more, which play in his brain) keep interrupting the flow of the
play. Sometimes they’re staged as vaudeville with histrionics from a mock
Hitler. But this breaking the fourth wall and distracting us with irresistible
music serves mainly as a distancing effect (beloved of Berthold Brecht to keep
an audience on its intellectual toes).
The talented cast of ten deliver Sigmund Romberg’s drinking
song in gorgeous, four part harmony. Certainly we can appreciate the
professor’s musical obsessions. Director Jim Petosa’s staging for New Rep is
inventive and the diversions amusing but the interruptions keep the emotional
impact of impending horror at arm’s length. For example, the actors cleverly
create a fiery conflagration with their fingers flickering like flames licking
at the burning books but we concentrate on the masterly stagecraft, like the
cast morphing into the circling, mechanical figures on the famous Munich clock tower.
I’m afraid I think any hope of landing a searing, emotional
reaction to the play is lost in a large space like New Rep’s main stage.
(Perhaps it might work better in a more intimate setting.) What does work is
the intellectual punch, reminding us that “good” citizens can be corrupted and
convinced to go along with obscene semantics like the professor espouses at the
end of the play: “The objective moral truth eliminates the subjective… It’s not
good or bad…[It’s] just the way it is,” as if morality can be debated. Chilling
words, indeed.
