There’s a great deal of hand wringing lately over the massive swing towards sequels and IP in film, with many elder statesmen of cinema indicating that it is part of an extended adolescence for culture. Adults aren’t trying to be adults anymore; they want media for children.

And while I think this is more true than not it is also an inside-out problem: the film industry is like this because the masses want it to be, politics are divisive because we want it to be, any number of business are closing down because we want them to be: we are responding with our attention, our money, our votes to things, and people are adjusting accordingly.

And one of the more interesting aspects of this is the pull between entertainment and artistry. It’s not to say these are opposites, but often what is commercially successful is escapism and it is hard to get people to buy into something which will make them feel “bad”.

Recently I saw a local production of What the Constitution Means to Me, and the people I went with reacted negatively to some of the content of that show because they wanted entertainment, they didn’t want to be confronted with certain aspects of reality.

CP Taylor’s Good seems difficult to produce within this context. It’s a story about a horrifying time and place (WWII Germany) and how a person can be led down the path to supporting the aims of the Nazis. They signal early on in Act I what the ending will be and there are few surprises down that long walk towards an ostensibly compassionate humanitarian deciding that of course, some members of the camp need to die for health reasons, naturally, and honestly if they were smart at all they would have left Germany long ago, so it’s really their fault.

It’s a brilliant script and a tough read. We sit in that tension for a long time, seeing Halder make worse and worse moral choices because they lead to better and better outcomes for him personally. Although the play never strays far from the Nazis, the play itself is grounded solidly in Halder’s home life, giving us a picture into the stresses he encounters daily.

All of that is on the textual level and ignores all the layers of theatricality that Taylor puts into the script: a small band that follows Halder around playing music to distract him and heighten what is happening onstage, the stream of consciousness construction which gives the reader no time to get comfortable in a time, place, scene, or conversation, making us as addled as Halder himself. It’s a play that earns the singing Hitler that shows up, which is something I can say about only one other work of American theater.

And all of this is on top of the very clear parallels a skilled team could draw to our modern life: whether that’s with school choice, trans-issues, or anything else. We all feel that our daily problems trump the small insecurities of any one particular group, and we do so until it’s either too late or we convince ourselves that really they should have helped themselves out a long time ago.

But who would come to see it if that’s what was put on? Who wants to pay for the privilege of being told that you’re not doing enough?