By Jana Mazurkiewicz
SAN DIEGO — Cygnet Theatre organized an informal lunch conversation earlier this month about Joshua Harmon’s comedy Bad Jews that will premiere in San Diego on January 12th. The meeting gathered journalists, theater enthusiasts, and cultural activists representing Jewish organizations based in San Diego. Cygnet Theatre’s artistic director, Sean Murray, and the marketing director, Autumn Doermann-Royas, conducted a lively discussion that focused on the title and themes of the play, but less so on its artistic interpretation. Two actors, Danielle Frimer (starring as “Super Jew” Daphna Feygenbaum) and Josh Odsess-Rubin (starring as a “Bad Jew” Liam Haber), joined the lunch to perform a scene from the play.
The director of the show, Rob Lutfy, opened the meeting with a short overview of the play: “The night after their grandfather’s funeral, three cousins engage in a verbal battle royale over a family heirloom. In one corner is the unstoppable and self-assured force of “Super Jew” Daphna. In the other, the immovable and entitled object of her secular cousin Liam. And in the middle is Liam’s brother Jonah, trying to stay out of the fray. Bad Jews is a savage comedy about family, faith, and legacy.” [This quote is taken from the theater’s website and its promotional materials which were repeated verbatim during the meeting.]
After introducing the play, Lufty ceded the floor to the actor Josh Odsess-Rubin and artistic director Sean Murray who both seemed to have much more to say about the play and about American Jews in general. While his intention might have been to give space for those artists who actually identify as Jewish, it would have been nice to hear Lufty’s own perspective on the issues. According to Sean Murray, the main goals of staging the play are to provoke a discussion about the future of American Judaism as well as to help rejuvenate both theater life and Jewish life in San Diego.
The previewed scene performed by Frimer and Odsess-Rubin was a fragment of “Super” and “Bad” Jew’s discussion about their generation’s attitude towards Judaism. The “Super” Jew advocates for preserving Judaism and her main argument is built around the following rhetorical question: “Now when it’s easiest and safest to be Jewish, should we just stop?” The “Bad” Jew, on the contrary, favors modernizing the tribe by cutting prejudices against other nationalities and joining the American melting pot. He is even seriously thinking about starting a family with a shikse and that idea makes the “Super” Jew super uneasy, to say the least.
The scene raised several questions from the participants. Who gets to decide who is a bad Jew? Is the bad Jew the one who celebrates his or her own Jewishness and believes that the Jewish nation is the chosen one? Is the bad Jew a Jew who does not want to follow the tradition and would rather embrace the multiculturalism of the Golden Land? Who is a good Jew then? The questions raised during the meeting were neither new nor exclusively Jewish; they could exemplify the mindset of any minority in any given epoch. Yet, they still seem relevant in today’s “United” States, especially due to the anxieties aroused by the recent election.
A big portion of the discussion was built around “Super” Jew’s argument: “Now when it’s easiest and safest to be Jewish, should we just stop?” The actors and the director asked the author of the play whether he thought that that line was still true after the presidential election and Joshua Harmon gave them his permission to remove it. Still, they are unsure what to do with the line so they asked the participants at the meeting whether they felt that it should be removed and the opinions were very divided. Some thought that, despite the recent rise of Anti-Semitic sentiments in the US, this country is still a safe harbor for the Jews, while others held an opposing opinion. I believe that only time will show who is right in this regard.
Opinions were also divided when it came to the title of the play. The members of the meeting were afraid that the San Diego audience, unlike a New York City audience, for instance, is not used to provocative titles and might react negatively towards Bad Jews, based solely on the title that they will see on the posters. It will be interesting to see how people react to both the title and to the play since I personally know New Yorkers who watched the 2013 production of Bad Jews and walked out of the play towards the end feeling deeply offended.
The discussion about Bad Jews did not cover any theatrical aspects of the production. I cannot imagine, though, what such a discussion would look like. From the scene we saw performed, it was clear that the show will be performed with no trace of artistic experimentation. This play about keeping up versus breaking with the tradition is written in a very conservative manner and faithfully follows the Aristotelian dramatic structure. It seems that the most interesting aspect of the endeavor to stage Bad Jews will be to observe the reactions of potential audience members representing various generations of both Jews and non-Jews, although I personally do not believe in the transformative power of performance on any given society. Other than that, in my opinion, theater serves as a fantastic detector of societal moods and frames of mind. Observing the audience’s reactions to Bad Jews can teach us about Jewish and non-Jewish San Diegans and their approach to tradition versus change in contemporary world.
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Jana Mazurkiewicz is a PhD candidate in the Slavic Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is also a playwright, theater director, and critic. She is currently working on her PhD thesis on Yiddish theater in Poland under Communism. She was born in Poland and relocated to the United States 4 years ago.