Bad Jews

Time Out says

Wed Oct 31 2012

Tracee Chimo whips up a mighty tzimmes in Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews. Playing the Jewier-than-thou Daphna (née Diana) Feygenbaum, Vassar senior and would-be immigrant to the Holy Land, she is fearsomely pushy and grabby; coils of brown hair hang from her head like the snakes of Medusa. Daphna is crashing at the Manhattan pad of her two rich cousins on the night of their grandfather’s funeral, and she is set on securing the late Poppy’s prized gold pendant of the Hebrew life symbol, chai. It is easy to walk all over the easygoing Jonah (Philip Ettinger), but his brother, Liam (Michael Zegen)—returning from a ski trip with his non-Jewish girlfriend, the benign and civil Melody (Molly Ranson)—has designs on the chai himself. A brutal battle ensues, because confrontation comes naturally to Daphna; she considers it part of her Jewishness. (“We’re not arguing,” she has to explain to Melody. “We’re talking.”)

Directed by Daniel Aukin with a fine sense of enclosure, Bad Jews comes out swinging with sharp comedy and well-observed intracultural conflict over the survival of Jewish culture and values. It is great fun to watch Chimo and Zegen dart and dodge around the stage, furiously staking out high ground. But it is also a little exhausting; Harmon’s brouhaha collapses, in its final 15 minutes, into a data dump of unassimilated debate points (and punitive get-a-life shaming of the shrew). The young playwright has many valid things to say, but in Bad Jews he talks himself out.—Adam Feldman

Follow Adam Feldman on Twitter: @FeldmanAdam