Portrayal of pure evil incisive but repetitive
They’re worse than you are. They swill booze from giant bottles shaped like the Eiffel Tower. Language eludes them; they can only titter ceaselessly. Apropos of nothing but their bliss and basest instincts, they might lick the face of one traumatized stranger and punch another in the stomach, filching the shoes off his feet for good measure.
Their news is worse, too, even more so than children getting separated from their parents at our borders. For them, it’s nuclear war on the other side of the globe. “Tens of millions” are already dead.
Yet, if the Las Vegas revelers and the geopolitical world of “Good. Better. Best. Bested.” perpetrate more evil than we do, the difference, Jonathan Spector’s incisive yet slight and repetitive play points out, is a matter of degree, not kind. We’re not as removed as we might like to think from Hobbesian brutishness and the end of humanity.
If you, too, have marveled at your own ability to compartmentalize horrific news and go on with your daily life, thinking of banalities and pursuing your selfish desires as countless others suffer and die, this world premiere co-production from Custom Made Theatre Company and Just Theater makes for a sobering reality check, prompting a salutary line of
inquiry: What is our moral obligation to our fellow humans when they endure catastrophe and we do not?
Directed by Lauren English and seen Friday, June 22, the show’s at its best when it distills the worst of humanity into finely chiseled comic nuggets that parade by in seamless montage.
Grown adults clad in sherbet-colored Bermuda shorts and fanny packs (Brooke Jennings did the costumes) waft onto the Strip like children who haven’t yet honed their motor or navigation skills. They have moments of compassion and consideration, as when a sex worker (Jessica Risco) comes to the aid of her bleeding ex-husband (David Sinaiko) — but only after warning him, “I know exactly how much money is in my purse.” But the brief good only makes them worse, because then they’re not just cartoons; they really are like us.
In one especially nauseating scene, the cheating boyfriends, the bachelorette carousers, the career gamblers and the johns all cram together at an open bar, howling for drinks, each a heedless, screeching lump of want as, elsewhere, atrocity unfolds. They’re led by performer Mick Mize, who’s superb in each of his ensemble roles, but who reaches a kind of contagious mania here, asserting Americans’ God-given “right to party” and jostling ever closer to the bar as demagogue, army general and ringleader all in one.
Yet ultimately, “Good. Better. Best. Bested.” is more a series of interconnected scenes than full play. Often, English’s direction fails to find the heightened tone the script calls for, presenting moments of barbarous unfeeling as if they’re unremarkable.
More damning, the script makes the same point over and over again, about how bad we are, without developing it, dulling intended shock. If it’s healthful for us to confront our apathy, inaction and boorishness, a play that has only that reminder soon gets mired in its own cynicism.