Brace yourself for the return of Bad Jews. When Joshua Harmon’s debut play first arrived on these shores in 2015 from New York, the poster was banned by Transport For London.
Back then, TfL deemed it “likely to cause widespread offence”, despite reassuring messages from the Board of Deputies saying they they had no problem with the publicity material or the play (even more bemusing, TfL ignored the five star review from the JC).
“In hindsight, I do sort of get it actually,” admits Simon Friend, who produced the UK premiere a year after the play exploded on to the stage in New York, and who — the JC can exclusively reveal — is planning the latest London revival.
The original poster for the UK production featured an image of two men and a woman fighting like cats and dogs under the play’s provocative title. “I don’t think Josh liked the artwork terribly,” remembers Friend, speaking on Zoom from his attic in Golders Green.
The dark comedy’s two main protagonists, or should that be antagonists, are cousins Liam and Daphna (played in 2015 by Ilan Goodman and Jenna Augen), whose grandfather Poppy has recently died. Ahead of the funeral, they are staying in Liam’s tiny New York apartment, along with Liam’s gentile (very gentile) girlfriend Melody, plus Liam’s younger brother, Jonah.
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Joshua Harmon
If every drama needs conflict, this one has it in spades. Daphna and Liam each have their eye on Poppy’s chai necklace, which he kept under his tongue for the two years he was clinging to life in Auschwitz. But the conflict also comes from Liam’s ostentatious display of his irreligious lifestyle, while Daphna is… well, let Harmon describe her, now that he has joined our conversation from New York.
“The character description of Daphna is something like ‘Jewishness oozes out of her heart’,” says Harmon. “She’s somebody who when she walks into a room, you’re like, ‘Jew’.”
The play’s title — a phrase Harmon grew up hearing often — comes from a scene in which Daphna remembers a Seder in her family’s past. Her father was reading in Hebrew, “which, God forbid one does at Passover”, and Liam gave his then-girlfriend a look that said, “I am above all this”. Then he tracks down a shortbread biscuit at the back of a kitchen cupboard and triumphantly declares himself to be a “bad Jew”.
But why revive the play now?
“Well, first and foremost,” says Friend, “and without wanting to flatter him too much on this call, I think it’s a terrific play which is always my reason for producing theatre.”
“Comedy is what I think people want at the moment,” adds the producer. “It feels like a very different world from when we first produced it in 2015”.
Photo©EllieKurttz Simon Friend WyndhamsTheatre 12thNov2021 2D5A6114
Simon Friend (Photo: Ellie Kurttz)
For Harmon, one difference between the production is generational. “There is no question that this is a play of the moment when it was first seen,” says the New Yorker. “Even if it’s for no other reason than it takes place after the funeral of a Holocaust survivor. Ten years ago, there were more of those.”
It is also the case that Daphna, who wears her Jewishness on her sleeve and intends to make aliyah, may be seen differently by today’s audience compared to those of 10 years ago.
“When the play was first produced in 2012, right before Obama’s second election, the world that I had grown up in as a kid in the 80s and 90s still felt very hopeful,” says Harmon. “To some audiences Daphna felt like she was a relic of something, that she was not forward thinking. Ten years later, there are security guards outside every synagogue and rabbis are getting trained in counterterrorism. The way that I grew up and understood what it meant to be Jewish is very different.”
As an example of this Harmon describes how soon after the shootings at the Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue where 11 Jews were killed, he went to a service at a synagogue in New York.
“A young woman was having her bat mitzvah,” remembers the playwright. “And it did occur to me that for her whole life if she ever talks about her bat mitzvah it will be about how it coincided with the greatest massacre of Jews in American history. That is not how I grew up. So [today] a character like Daphna, who I’ve always loved, is much harder for people to dismiss.”
The world has also changed in how Jews are portrayed on stage, with the “Jewface” controversy still echoing across the theatre industry.
“I will just say as that the producer it is our intention that the Jewish characters in the play are [performed by] actors with Jewish heritage,” says Friend, who has yet to cast his new production.
“How do you find that out in the UK?” asks Harmon. “Because in America, you legally cannot ask people what they are.” But it’s different here, says Friend. “You need to be seen casting in an inclusive way. And with Josh’s play there’s a certain fabric of Judaism not only in the words and on the page but in the rhythms of the dialogue, which is more difficult to replicate if you don’t have that in your personal history.”
For Harmon, casting is as much a question of consistency as it is authenticity.
“If we live in a world where this is important to people then it needs to be important across the board,” he says. “If we’re going to decide that it matters, then it should matter for everybody.”
Since he wrote Bad Jews Harmon’s plays (including Admissions and Skintight) invariably feature Jewish experience. His latest, currently being performed in New York, is Prayer For The French Republic.
Set in Paris, where a young Jewish American woman is visiting her extended French family, the play explores the particular condition of being Jewish in a France where antisemitism can feel like an existential threat.
The title refers to the prayer traditionally heard at the end of services in French synagogues, much like the prayer for the Queen in British synagogues.
“I descend from French Jews,” says Harmon.
“I speak French and I studied there So I have all of these ties. I set out to write this play about a handful of French Jews, this one family, and in the process of writing that I also found I had to write about North Africa [one of the characters is an Algerian Jew] and America, because some of the family had travelled there, and Israel and Cuba and Mexico. Suddenly a play about a couple of generations of one family with just a few individuals became a global story. I was not anticipating doing that when I set out to write it,” says Harmon.
But then when he began writing Bad Jews he didn’t know how that was going to end up either.
“The truth is when I wrote the play I didn’t have an agent, I wrote it in total obscurity and I wrote it for myself. I was at a low point in, well I wouldn’t even call it my career. But I had no indication that the play would ever get produced. So the fact that we’re here, you know 12-13 years after I wrote it, talking about the next West End production… well, it’s insane.”
Bad Jews is at The Arts Theatre from July 14 to September 25
