More lows than chais in Actors’ Summit’s ‘Bad Jews’

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

“Bad Jews” – the purposefully provocative title of what has become one of the nation’s most produced new plays – typically refers to members of the tribe who eat on Yom Kippur, text on the Sabbath, and have their kids bow out early from Sunday school to beat the traffic.  But Joshua Harmon’s tenacious, acid-washed comedy digs much deeper.

The play features the young, devout Diana Feygenbaum (Brittany Gaul), who goes by her Hebrew name Daphna as if it were a calling card for her sanctimony.  She believes that her connection to her faith and heritage makes her the rightful heir of a religious relic left behind by her just-departed grandfather.  The gold ornament – a chai that the grandfather kept safe during his years in a concentration camp – is in her cousin Liam’s (Kyle Huff) possession.

The chai has only sentimental value for Liam, who is a contemptuous and secular Jew.  He and his shiksa girlfriend, Melody (Gabi Shook), arrive late for the funeral by the time they enter Liam’s younger brother Jonah’s Upper West Side studio apartment, where they are confronted by Daphna.

Lacking the family gene for hyper-articulate confrontation, Jonah (Nate Miller) wants nothing more than to be left out of the discussion about who should get the chai.

All this is a recipe for a battle royale between cultural and religious Judaism; a heated, take-no-prisoner debate about what faith means to many third-generation Jewish-Americans.  And both Daphna and Liam make interesting arguments. 

Says the formidable Daphna: “And so now, when it's easier to be Jewish than it has ever been in the history of the world, now when it’s safest, now we should all stop?  I can’t.” 

Says the uptight Liam:  “I’m sorry, but I can't get worked up about preserving a totally watered down version of something that wasn’t even true to begin with, and I’m not going to allow it to dictate how I live my life or who I choose to live my life with so I can genetically or biologically pass on something I don’t even believe in.”

And by having this debate take place in one scene in one act in one room between two very intelligent but emotionally stunted cousins, we see what happens when a philosophical and political argument turns into something personal. 

Better yet, because the debaters possess an arsenal of insight into each other’s soft-spots and pressure points – garnered from a lifetime of sitting at the kid’s table at family gatherings for the high holidays – all the baiting, bickering and biting results in nonstop comedy.

But not so much on the Actors’ Summit stage.