How fitting that the Actors’ Warehouse would select “Bad Jews” as the first offering in its classy new venue — a former church on Northeast First Street that has long since been repurposed from house of worship to more or less secular pursuits.
If you approach the title of Joshua Harmon’s dark comedy with some trepidation, rest assured, you will find ample justification. Reputedly, Harmon’s own mother tried to talk him into changing the title to something else … anything else.
But here’s the thing about “Bad Jews.” It will make you laugh. It will make you cringe. It may set your teeth to grinding. Perhaps you will take furtive glances to see if others laugh at the same parts you do. In equal measure it will offend and entertain and enlighten.
In other words, “Bad Jews” serves precisely the purpose founders of the Actors Warehouse intended from the outset: To employ the performing arts to promote critical thinking; to hold up a mirror that will reflect the best and worst of our culture, our society … indeed of this very thing we call the human condition.
And what’s wrong with that?
At heart this is a story about long simmering familial conflicts. Three cousins — millennials all — come together after their grandfather’s funeral. The elder patriarch was a Holocaust survivor who somehow managed to hang onto his chai — a beloved piece of religious jewelry — throughout his internment in the camps. And now that he’s dead, it falls to the cousins to decide who gets possession of Poppy’s most cherished possession.
Will it be Daphine, who wears her Judaism on her sleeve and wields her faith in blunt instrument fashion?
Or Liam, outwardly agnostic but not adverse to being Jewish when it suits him?
Or perhaps Jonah, Liam’s younger brother, who goes to extremes to keep his opinions, his faith — seemingly his every thought and emotion — to himself.
But if Jonah is an introvert he comes by it honestly. Daphne and Liam, each in their own way, are veritable forces of nature; explosive, manipulative, constantly at each other’s throats and both demanding of Jonah’s loyalty. Whoever said there are no atheists in foxholes surely must have had these two combatant cousins in mind.
Molly Washington is superb as Daphne; venomous, sarcastic, self-righteous, forever probing and exploiting her opponents weak spots for her own advantage. Encountering Liam’s new love interest — the very non-Jewish Melody — Daphne is relentless.
“What kind of name is Melody?” She demands.
“I dunno, Caucasian?” Melody responds.
“You have the blood of genocidians coursing through your veins at this very second,” Daphne concludes.
If Daphne is difficult to warm to, then James Dennis’ Liam is little more likable and no less ruthless in his determination to deny his cousin possession of Poppy’s chai.
“Do not Holocaust me,” he tells Daphne. And, “Are we really doing Chosen People now?”
Against these two histrionic supernovas, Jonah and Melody are necessarily lesser lights. But Kaylene Sattanno’s Melody — replete with platinum wig and “indigenous Delawarean” naïveté — more than holds her own against Daphne’s shrewishness and Liam’s condescension.
And what to say about Milo Brooks’ Jonah? First, don’t let his black socks, jockey shorts and slacker attitude fool you. Beneath all that feigned indifference is a well of steely resolve.
Incidentally, it is clear that co-directors Stephen Butler and Robert E. Sturmer shared the same concerns that caused Harmon’s mother to argue for a title change. Following each performance the cast and crew of “Bad Jews” sit down with audience members for a free-ranging discussion about what was said, what was heard, and what it all means.
All of which helps make “Bad Jews” worth seeing, mulling and stewing over and then talking about.
And, really, isn’t that what theater is for?