Theatre in Review: Good (Potomac Theatre Project/Atlantic Theater Stage II)

	Tim Spears, Michael Kaye. Photo: Stan Barouh

Let's give the good folks at Potomac Theatre Project points for timeliness. Watching John Halder, the protagonist of Good, twist his soul into a monstrous pretzel in order to accommodate the dictates of the Nazi Party, I couldn't stop thinking of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, et al., struggling to come to some accommodation with the fact of Donald Trump's candidacy. This summer, real life has given us many vivid illustrations of playwright C. P. Taylor's thesis that thinking human beings are capable of the grossest distortions of logic in order to keep themselves attached to those in power. Several editorials this week have assured us that, even in the face of racial strife, we are not seeing a replay of 1968. Having seen Good, I think we need reassurance that we aren't reliving the fact of the Weimar Republic.

Halder is a professor of literature living in Frankfurt; despite the tumultuous times -- the play begins in 1933 -- he can be fairly described as apolitical. Aside from his work, he is focused entirely on his personal life, which includes an arid marriage, a budding love affair with a young female student, and a mother who is suffering from both blindness and dementia. Pressured by his wife, Helen (who has been advised by her unseen father), Halder joins the Nazi Party, largely to keep his career and family intact. ("I'm not one hundred percent sure about Hitler," he says, in what is surely the understatement of the year.) It can't even be said that he wastes much thought on his decision; he simply wants to be left alone to live his life. But, as an academic and writer of note, Halder is not allowed to remain anonymous. Because he has written a novel that argues for the legalization of euthanasia, he is sent to inspect nursing homes and, later, to develop a program for the "humane" murder of the elderly and infirm. An academic paper he presents about the Jewish influence on the great 19th-century Russian novels is later given the most toxic official interpretation. Attached to the staff of Adolph Eichmann, he ends up intimately involved in the development of the death camps.

Michael Kaye captures nearly everything about Halder -- his insecurity and attachment to bourgeois comforts as well as his need to please others. He even strikes a sympathetic figure when seen at home ricocheting between his demanding, desperate mother and Helen, who, after years of self-absorption, is terrified of losing him. The actor shows how each of Halder's moral concessions is meant to be a one-off, a necessary accommodation to maintain his place in the worlduntil he is required to make yet another step into the abyss. By the time the horror of Kristallnacht is unleashed on Germany, his moral sense has been fatally dulled. As synagogues burn, store windows are shattered, and innocents are beaten, he says, "This is a regime in its childhood. It's a social experiment in its earliest stages. You know what a child is like...self-discipline isn't formed, yet a large element of unpredictability...it could be...if the Jews stayed here much longer...you see what I'm getting at! Some of the extreme elements in the regime could get out hand. Christ knows what they would do to the Jews next...I see tonight as basically humane action...it's going to shock the Jews into the reality of their situation in Nazi Germany...tomorrow morning...they'll be running for their lives out of the country. A sharp, sudden shock...that is going to make those who still delude themselves they can stay here in peace to face reality..." Thus a savage pogrom is reframed as an act of charity.

And yet, for all its appreciation of Orwellian locutions and ethical gymnastics, Good stops short of delivering a knockout punch, for two reasons. One is that Taylor's characters are such thin creations, most of them defined by a single trait; Helen is ineffectual, Anne is bland, Halder's mother screams and squawks, and the Nazi characters by and large mouth the party line. (One exception is Freddie, a Nazi officer who secretly loves black American blues singers and who fears that his inability to have children will wreck his career.) Halder bounces off the others like a pinball, but the encounters rarely prove revealing. It doesn't help that the play's language sometimes seems to be running on empty. Taylor wrote 80 plays in his 59 years and he seems not to have had much time for the niceties of style. I lost track of how many times I heard such (essentially British) expressions as "fuck all" and "you Nazi cunt."

Even Halder is something of a blank: for all his devotion to literature, he comes across as a faceless, colorless bureaucrat, exactly the sort of person to fit Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil. The first act, which sets up Halder's situation and relationships, is rather dull, with some halting attempts at humor. An even bigger problem is that, under Jim Petosa's direction, the production fails to make a palpable connection between Halder and the music that plays in his head whenever he is forced to face another ugly reality. We never feel that he is retreating into some private world, dulling the pain of his choices with melodies ranging from "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" to "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," as sung by Bing Crosby.

Still, the second act packs its share of horrors, and Kaye is surrounded by an often-incisive supporting cast, among them Tim Spears as Maurice, Halder's best friend, a Jew who is desperate to gets his family to Switzerland; Christo Grabowski as Freddie who seems to subtly agree to a plan for Halder to impregnate his wife; Adam Ludwig, whose Eichmann is the very model of a modern middle manager; Caitlin Rose Duffy as Anne, who morphs from a bland ingénue into the perfect Nazi wife ("If we try to the utmost to be good...what else can we do?"); and Noah Berman as Bok, a cheerful young brown shirt, whose praise of the Führer ("He's got us our country back.") packs a chill for contemporary audiences in a way that Taylor could not have foreseen.

The production, structured as a series of short scenes, benefits from a simple presentation. Mark Evancho's set consists of an upstage piano plus a series of four benches and a handful of boxes; Hallie Zieselman's lighting reshapes the stage as needed, in addition to providing a startling backlit entrance for Halder. Jessica Vankempen's costumes -- Nazi uniforms included -- are solid, convincing examples of period wear. ,b>Seth Clayton's sound design provides nearly constant underscoring of the music in Halder's mind.

Good has always been a problematic piece; it arrived on Broadway in a blaze of hype, only to be greeted by disappointing reviews and an underwhelming 141-performance run. Yet, in its mordant depiction of truth's fungibility when dictators rule, it can still get under one's skin. Having seen it on a day in which Kansas politicians began calling public schools "government schools," when Rudolph Giuliani took to the airwaves to denounce the members of Black Lives Matter as racists, and when the presumptive Republican presidential nominee insisted, without a shred of evidence, that people across America were holding moments of silence for Micah Johnson, the Dallas police killer, it provided more than enough thoughts for a sleepless night. -- David Barbour