Bad Jews writer Joshua Harmon is back with a second thrillingly argumentative comedy drama. As with the first, this one was acclaimed in New York and is also about racial identity. However, whereas his previous play explored the legacy of the Holocaust for millennial Jews — and, yes, it too was a comedy— this one unpicks the knots that white, middle-class liberals get into when attempting to redress racial injustices of the past.
Take Sherri Rosen-Mason, played by Alex Kingston. Sherri is the head of admissions for a New Hampshire boarding school whose intake was once exclusively white. But, thanks to her efforts, whites now account for only 82 per cent of the students.
When it comes to race, Sherri is a fearless confronter of politically incorrect thinking and language and is giving poor Roberta (Margot Leicester) a hard time over the latest brochure she has produced for the school. All its photographs are of white people, not because it’s her favourite skin colour but because, although she is “racially blind” it is hard to keep up with the correct terminology. For instance why “a person of colour” is ok, but “dark-skinned” isn’t. (Although even Roberta might balk at Amber Rudd’s recent use of “coloured”.)
The action takes place over several months and is set in Sherri’s office-cum-kitchen. After Roberta’s dressing-down, it emerges that the black son of Sherri’s close friend Ginnie (Sarah Hadland) has got in to Yale and that Sherri’s son Charlie (played by Ben Edelman who reprises his performance in Daniel Aukin’s acclaimed New York production) hasn’t.
What no one can know is whether Charlie is a victim of the kind of positive discrimination his mother deploys to increase diversity at her school. Or, put more bluntly, Sherri’s white son couldn’t get in so that Ginnie’s black son could. Bitter Charlie has no doubt this is the case.
Those who saw Bad Jews will remember the excoriating speech in which one Jew eviscerates what he sees as the self-righteous brand of Jewish identity flaunted by another. This play has an equivalent to that angry speech when Charlie rails at an admission policy of a university that would have once denied him a place because he is Jewish and now does so because he is classified as white.
It’s a hilarious speech, superbly delivered by Edelman with a mix of aggression and exasperation.
“We’ve raised a Republican,” declares Charlie’s deadpan dad (Andrew Woodall), who is also the head of Sherri’s school.
Kingston terrifically conveys the sanctimonious smugness of white middle classes who work to redress racial injustice, but only as long as it doesn’t personally cost them anything. When confronted by her son’s new-found self-sacrifice — he’s effectively opting out of higher education to make way for someone from a disadvantaged background— she pulls every string to ensure that her son benefits from the privilege he has been brought up to exploit.
Edelman steals the show, though the real star here is Harmon, who has the top dramatist’s talent for making argument as mesmerising as a firework display.
