Concerning what may have been the late Cecil P. Taylor's best effort, Bread and Butter, the English critic Harold Hobson wrote that "if the play is about the sadness of time's destruction of our ideals," it is a very grave point that the two principal characters "never really had any ideals at all." In [Good] … the same problem obtains; this tale of how John Halder, a "good" German, gets sucked and suckered into the Nazi party fails right off the bat by not persuading us that we are dealing with a man of parts and ideals….

Good makes no literal sense. No novelist-professors of literature became S.S. officers—the last thing the S.S. wanted or needed; indeed, writers of the elitist or rightist persuasion did not even make it, or want to make it, into the party on any level—vide George, Jünger, Benn, et al. In no case would the Nazis have picked such a marginal and irrelevant figure to confer prestige on their final solution: but if such prestige was the aim, why is Halder kept out of the limelight and not put to publicity use? Anyway, as written, the character of Halder could not have liquidated even the roaches in a small apartment, and could hardly have passed the physical examination required to get into the S.S.

And the play makes no literary sense, either. The relationship between Halder and the women in his life is insufficiently developed, and does not appear to be of the kind to drive a man of even middling intellect and character into monstrousness. Similarly, the friendship with Maurice is never properly established or dramatized, either in its strength or in its dissolution. And the blandishments or pressures of the Nazis are far too simplistic. Matters are further bogged down by Taylor's insistence on cocktail-party Brechtianizing. By way of an amiable alienation effect, we get an onstage band that continually butts in, various song turns by diverse cast members in German or English (with some songs wholly out of place and time), and steady scrambling of scenes, so that everything is interspersed with or superimposed on everything else. This effectively shoots down the few fledgling ideas Good may have, and sacrifices minimal communicativeness to Brecht and circuses. (p. 77)

[This] play that appears to address itself to a serious intellectual problem has almost nothing to say on the subject, and proceeds to disguise its nugacity by resorting to any number of modish—or, rather, outmoded—strategies. The result is neither intellectual nor honest non-intellectual theater but a flabby pseudointellectual rodomontade. (pp. 77-8)