Bad Jews, Worse Play

It may be time to call a moratorium on shouty dysfunctional family plays. This season so far the Yale Rep has given us Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ War and Dania Gurira’s Familiar. After the heartwarming season-opening fake-out of Our Town, Long Wharf Theater has presented Dael Orlandersmith’s Forever — which, though it’s a one-woman show, bristles with mother/daughter antagonisms. Now it’s putting on the current small-cast contemporary-setting darling of regional theaters nationwide, Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews.

Generally speaking, these plays feature insufferably self-righteous central characters who ignite the stage with fiery, infuriating rhetoric, only to be shouted down by fed-up family members.

Bad Jews, which runs at the Long Wharf until Mar. 29, is distinctive, at least, in that every single one of its characters is unlikeable — and unthreatening. The four characters, gathered in an apartment after the funeral of a grandfather, are not dangerous people, delusional world leaders, or unhinged sociopaths. They are young adults acting defensively and immaturely in the privacy of a New York highrise, late at night.

Rest assured, good Jews and everyone else, that Bad Jews is not so much about bad Jews as it is about spoiled brats. Religion plays a big part in the play, but the tensions would be easily transposed to Christianity or a host of other religions. The play’s fierce fulminations don’t challenge the concept of organized religion. Instead, they question how people use faith to bolster their self-worth, or shame others, or avoid responsibility.

Bad Jews provides the dramatic truth that there are annoying people in the world, people whose slim self-serving justifications can be easily shot down and dismissed when they are engaged in a well-scripted dialogue. Sitting in a theater watching these ideological set-ups, it’s easy to feel the way one does when watching left-wing talkshow hosts who endlessly factcheck and challenge Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. Such a strenuous response not only can lend credence to the original statements and disseminate them further; it can waste time and keep strong opposing counterarguments from being fully formed.

What else doesn’t get formed? Strong characters.

The first ones we meet are Daphna Feygenbaum, a Jewish college student who is loudly proud of her Jewish heritage, and her cousin Jonah, who is as withdrawn and non-confrontational as Daphna is outspoken and intense. The two are sharing a spare apartment in a cushy Upper West Side neighborhood — the bathroom apparently has an astounding view of the river — because they’ve just attended the funeral of their beloved grandfather. They are soon joined by Jonah’s combative older brother Liam, who has a longstanding distaste for Daphna’s impertinent piety, and by Liam’s girlfriend Melody, a blonde blue-eyed shikse who, when asked about her own cultural heritage, can’t get much further than ​“Delaware.”

Those who think that the classic 20th century dramas of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller are too pat and moralistic should get a load of Bad Jews. You see every outburst coming from miles away. The central battle of the superiority complexes — Daphna’s is faith-based, Jonah’s is from being a worldly academic and domineering older brother — is countered by the supposed purity and innocence of the wide-eyed Melody and the distanced, guarded Jonah.

As soon as one argument ends, another starts. They take many forms: the rant that happens when an opponent has just left the room; the oneupmanship of who loved or understood their granddad more; and the related battle over who deserves to have a precious object he had kept with him on his deathbed.

When Daphna asserts her spiritual beliefs for the umpteenth time and Liam counters with a diatribe about literal interpretations of biblical passages about women and slavery and stonings — the sort of litany that has fueled many an internet meme and the opening episode of The West Wing — you realize that Harmon has run out of entertaining indignation and the play has lost nearly all its momentum. All he can do is gather up pieces of family lore he’s dropped throughout the drama and wrap them up in a tidy ending that milks whatever sentimentality is still allowed onstage for all it’s worth.

This is facile playwriting, a ping-pong match of outrage, the reaction to that outrage, and then when that’s bobbled away, a brand new and only tangentially related outrage. The main takeaway from this intermissionless 90-minute volley of pissed-off pronouncements is that some people just won’t shut up.

To the Long Wharf’s credit, the theater has gotten an accomplished Off-Broadway director, Oliver Butler, to helm the play, which — to be fair — had solid success in New York and has been getting a lot of attention at theaters around the country. Butler doesn’t forget that Bad Jews has many comic moments that you don’t want to lose amid all those vicious tirades. He finds the physical action in the play and uses it to lighten and limber up the verbose proceedings. He lets the ceaseless chatter fly briskly about the stage; the banter bounces from sofa to kitchen to coat closet (within Antje Ellermann’s clean, expansive apartment set design) with the precision of a quadrophonic stereo system. When Butler can’t let an argument fully breathe — as with some lengthy fraternal bickering in the cramped hallway at one end of the stage, shortly after Liam enters the drama — the confinement exposes the deficiencies of Harmon’s longwinded script.

Likewise, the four actors don’t get all manic and Methody in their depiction of these cliche-ridden characters. They embrace the stereotypes and play them up grandly. They also look for ways to move around and add variety to their fights. Keilley McQuail’s Daphna doesn’t just dominate every conversation with her dripping, venomous ripostes and holier-than-thou posturing; she never stops arching her eyebrows or glaring daggers or using other non-verbal weapons in her arsenal. Christy Escobar is able to sustain Melody’s cheerful disposition, and her unbelievable obliviousness to Daphna’s assaults on her, for an impressively long time before she finally joins the fray. Michael Steinmetz doesn’t just yell and stomp as Liam; he blisters with such cartoonish exaggeration that you expect smoke to come out of his ears. By contrast, Max Michael Miller plays Jonah so unassumingly that for half the play you barely notice he’s in the room. Keeping such a quiet and underwritten character relevant in the midst of such egregious grandstanding by everyone else is the trickiest acting job in Bad Jews.

In keeping this oft-incendiary play playful, Butler and his cast also deftly maneuver some rather unpredictable set pieces and props. There’s furniture and baggage and ski equipment that amusingly gets in the way of the fighting. There’s an air mattress that must be inflated during a dialogue. There’s also a small piece of jewelry, symbolic of both family suffering and family bonding — not to mention a major icon of the family’s Jewishness — that must be lovingly draped around a neck, grabbed at meanly, and generally held up as a high treasure.

The Long Wharf has a long tradition of strong plays about Jewish identity, where that identity is defined and defended amid a constant debate from other cultures and perspectives. We’ve had Sixteen Wounded, My Name is Asher Lev, The Grey Zone, the bio-dramas Paper Doll (about Jackie Susann and her husband Irving Mansfield) and Satchmo at the Waldorf (where the main character besides Louis Armstrong was his Jewish manager Joe Glaser). The Long Wharf offered a Jewish reading series during the 2004 – 5 season that featured works by Donald Margulies and Clifford Odets, playwrights who’ve also been given full productions at the theater.

As for disaffected-youth comedy/dramas, the Long Wharf has premiered works by Julia Cho, Noah Haidle, and others who carefully and credibly articulated some of the problems that young people have in communicating their problems to their peers and elders.

Which leads to a major issue with the Long Wharf staging Bad Jews. On the night I saw it, fewer than ten people in the audience appeared to be under 30 years old. The vast majority were in their 50s, 60s, or older. So a play about 20-something New Yorkers expressing themselves to each other is being presented to a suburban subscriber audience of people who are old enough to be those characters’ parents or grandparents, and are likely to respond to them accordingly. Do they see the characters as idealistic youth trying to figure out the world around them, or do they write them off as whiny and ungrateful? When they see these rude, insulting young people fight over a sacred relic that their grandfather saved and revered, who are they going to side with?

Certainly Bad Jews is better, as comedy and as social satire, than Daniel Goldfarb’s stereotype-driven, flat-out-embarrassing Modern Orthodox, which the Long Wharf world-premiered in 2000. But the legacy of thoughtful, insightful drama about religious meaning, cultural heritage, and coming-of-age epiphanies is not aided by this spiteful and simplistic bit of sensationalistic name calling.

Bad Jews runs through Mar. 29 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr. (203) 787‑4282.