THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Growing up in a repressive Irish Catholic household in New Jersey, as I did as a child, I began to fantasize and romanticize the notion of being Jewish. Not to the point where I would ever entertain conversion from the Roman persuasion into which I had been indoctrinated, but I did long for a culture that was more direct, that didn't just foster guilt but threw it in each other's faces like a cream pie in a slapstick comedy; a culture that confronted uncomfortable feelings and thoughts head on, paraded them around and turned them into a variety show; a culture in which (I perceived anyway), there was a strong intellectual tradition of Freud and Mendelssohn and of having open bitter exchanges with each other; a culture – again that I perceived – where you could not only really say how you felt about each other, especially if the truth hurt, but stay together and actually become closer as a family as a result.
Bad Jews, Joshua Harmon's poignantly moving comedy which returns to London this summer for a limited run, brings us into that fiercely proud, proudly intellectual, searingly sarcastic world of the Jewish American family, in a bracing exploration of culture, identity and what it means to be Jewish in America in the 21st century.
The most prominent feature of this play for me is its frenetic momentum. I was tired sitting down in a fairly small seat in the London Arts Theatre and deeply apprehensive about drifting during the 95 minutes running time.
I need not have worried.
Rosie Yadid's loud and boisterous entrance as Daphna Feygenbaum, searingly sardonic and deeply proud of her Hebrew heritage, about to graduate from Vasser University in upstate New York and poised to make Aliyah after graduation, carries us on wave after wave of dramatically compelling energy. Daphna is in town for her grandfather's funeral and from her entrance, Yadid carries a commanding, electric energy that sparkles and fizzles as she incisively and deftly lands every brilliantly dark and bleakly funny insult seamlessly embedded into Harmon's excellent script.
Daphna and her cousins, brothers Liam and Jonah Haber, have gathered for their grandfather's funeral and thought provoking, raucous arguments and debates almost immediately erupt about 'Poppy's' legacy and who has more ownership over it.
It feels like Yadid is channeling her inner Parker Posey when Liam brings home his fiancée, fish-out-of-water, sweetly Delawarean Melody, played with a thin layer of wholesomeness that we expect to crack any second like the brittle top of a crème brûlée. The whole dynamic reminds one of Wendy McLeod's House of Yes, a much darker and bleaker comedy adapted for film in 1997. In that story, Tori Spelling plays the wholesome prom queen brought home to meet the approval of the family. Like Spelling, Olivia Le Andersen plays Melody with a rigid and blithe naivete that whets our appetite for when that layer of sugar finally breaks.
Yadid's performance is cleverly contrasted by Charlie Beaven's laconic portrayal of Jonah, moodily and stubbornly reluctant to become embroiled in any of the internecine family conflict and hijinks, but masterfully using the most subtle of physical movements and facial expressions at key moments to elicit a devious joy and hilarity.
It also feels like a play that Martin McDonagh would have written, had the Leenane trilogy been set in upper Manhattan instead of the lonesome west of Ireland. So engagingly layered on top of each other are all the strata of filial conflict, and so wrong do all of the insults hurled sound, that Harmon reminds us of McDonagh's ability to trivialize and hold in contempt any myopic, proprietary and uncomplicated understanding of one's history and culture.
The play's key strength and most searching question, that we are left with at the end, is that of identity. It cleverly dispels what we all thought was going to be the new liberal melting pot of Americanness back in the '90s and '00s, by forcing us to question phrases like 'it doesn't matter where we're from' or 'we're all just American'. It brings us to the brink and allows us to keep probing these deep questions of identity well after curtain call, and it's a pretty perfect mix of comedy and catharsis in the process.
