The most controversial play at the Edinburgh Fringe this year is by Joshua Kaplan, not the JK of JC fame but a gay American lawyer-turned-writer working in Hollywood writers’ rooms for the TV show Tokyo Vice.
He has another more personal project that gloried in the provocative title Dirty Jewish Faggot before it was changed to the only slightly less provocative Fegele, on which more later.
However, it is his play Terf (yes, another provocative title) that is currently making waves and which is receiving its world premiere this week in Edinburgh. The work is a satire and imagines what might pass between Harry Potter creator JK Rowling and actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson were they to find themselves together again after years of being among the most visible antagonists in the trans-culture wars.
For Kaplan the storm that followed the play’s announcement before anyone had been bought a ticket has been difficult, but when when we meet in a fashionable east London café not far from where the play’s first scene is located, he says his “mental health is better”.
In that first scene, Daniel and Rupert are eating sample courses in a test kitchen before, at their invitation, they are joined by Rowling. “This minimalist trend in restaurants is so depressing. Like eating in a gulag,” she says. In the early draft of the play I saw, Rowling is an acerbic with an air of Cruella about her, Radcliffe is a recovering (or is it lapsing) alcoholic, Grint is an insecure figure who works hard to keep his fame going and Watson comes across a virtue-signaller with little grasp of the issues to which she attaches herself.
The day before I met Kaplan it was announced that the venue of his play had been changed because of security concerns. The writer has been called a “woke fascist” by far-right commentators in the US and gender-critical groups have called his play misogynistic. The work has been difficult to cast because actors have feared being targeted by activists.
“I don’t want to paint myself as a victim at all, but I wasn’t prepared for this,” says Kaplan. “I am somebody who doesn’t feel very comfortable being in the limelight. I’m a writer.”
In fact, the 45-year-old cuts a nervous, even fragile figure. Raised in Long Island, he speaks in what might be called New York Jewish, in a dialect in which words are spoken faster than most people think them.
He still seems in shock at the response his play has elicited. “I’ve been working in Hollywood for a while and there nothing takes off like this. You write and it just dies or it takes years. But there are no ‘no people’ when you put something on at the Fringe.”
Mostly, though, he is shocked at being subject to the very weaponised language that his play exists to expose. “I’m from a family of therapists. My dad’s a psychologist, my sister is an analyst. We are not bullies.”
The title of Kaplan’s play is an acronym for trans exclusionary radical feminist and is often used by trans activists who are against gender-critical people such as Rowling. “It’s a derogatory term. I have this impulse to reflect words back to people who use them. I want people to think about the meaning that’s going on behind words.”
This is how the title of his pilot Dirty Jewish Faggot, now called Fagele, came about. “It’s about this guy called Gadbeck who was a gay Jewish vigilante who fought the Nazis in the Second World War in Berlin.
“I’m not saying everyone is wrong to use the word Terf,” he continues, “but you do need to think about the words you’re using. And if you have, good for you good for you, but I don’t think everyone has.”
Kaplan began writing his play in 2020.
“After Rowling first tweeted [on trans issues], I saw Daniel’s tweets, then Rupert’s, then Emma’s. It just struck me like a family fight that was playing out in a really public arena.”
But not in which Kaplan is interested in choosing sides. There are people in both camps who can fairly be excused of dehumanising the other, he says. “I want the audience to feel more connected to their humanity when they leave than when they came in,” he says.
Something that he thinks Rowling’s novels achieves. Growing up he was a Potter “fanatic”, he says,
“There’s a scene where Voldemort takes over and the wizards are on top and the humans are underneath, like being pushed down. It really reminded me of a Holocaust memorial,” says Kaplan. More merciless dehumanisation. “The books felt like they were written for people like me.” he says.
And then there is the influence of his maternal grandmother, Luba, whose entire family was wiped out in the Shoah. She survived ghettos and concentration camps before she arrived in America with a Russian soldier, Kaplan’s grandfather.
“Survivors seem to kind of fall into two categories,” observes Kaplan. “There the ones who shut down and became very cold and then there are ones like my grandmother who was the warmest and most wonderful person and had a positive outlook on the world. She didn’t hate anybody.”
Kaplan’s point is that Luba was in many ways the ultimate victim. Both her children (Kaplan’s mother and his uncle) died before she did, as did both her husbands. She cared for the second before he died of Alzheimer’s. Yet when she was alive she defiantly refused to be defined as a victim, which, says Kaplan, feels an alien concept in today’s culture.
“We live in a time where everything is black and white. There is no nuance. You’re either a victim or a perpetrator, and it doesn’t have to be like that.”
Instead of the “anger and sadness” that drives so much contemporary political discourse, the world would be so much better if, like Luba, more people avoided the cycle of fear and loathing. “There is something about social media that perpetuates it,” says Kaplan. “My grandmother was very mindful of trying to end that cycle in her life.”
Terf is at The Assembly Rooms from August 1
