7/23/26: BirthrightWhat: MCC presents Jonathan Spector's new play spanning eighteen years in the lives of six friends in the aftermath of their Birthright trip to Israel (2006, 2006, and 2024). Over the years the characters go through changes big and small: marriage, divorce, children, career reevaluations, substance abuse, and an ever-widening gulf among perspectives on the Jewish state.
And? I love Spector's writing -- he has a real ear for dialogue and conversational rhythm, including and especially how quickly things can spiral out of control -- but this play is weaker story-wise than Eureka Day and This Much I Know, both of which I saw last season. Though each act features a time jump from the previous, it thankfully doesn't take too much of a lift to catch the audience up on what we missed, especially if we managed to catch key details from the projected montage of emails, texts, and social media posts that starts both Acts Two and Three. That out of the way, the individual arc of each act feels a bit thin -- more a drop-in than a story -- and Act Two especially feels more like the audience is being talked at than hearing true interaction between lifelong friends. What can be amazing with works that discuss big ideas and complicated questions is bringing the audience (or reader, when it comes to fiction and poetry) into a place of active listening and empathy, to put a human behind whom we've told ourselves is a monster. And while the characters are well-sketched, there's not quite a story here. I think this play wants to be Heroes of the Fourth Turning but doesn't quite achieve it (interestingly one of the performers here, Zoë Winters, starred in that as well).
This goal is eventually achieved, to a degree, in the third act. Though the audience is yet again subjected to an extended sequence of being talked at, at least in this case it's to a deliberate point. The two women at the extreme ends of the divide among Jewish people in the wake of October 7, 2023, Chaya and Izzy, reach critical mass without fully listening to each other, instead turning to their phones to quickly google other people's essays or Wikipedia articles to prove their point. Both women are talking at each other, not to each other, and both have lost the ability to listen. No longer a conversation, it is now a spoken version of the online screeds yelling into the void at strawman enemies. Mercifully, this explosion finally breaks as we see the very real damage and fallout both Izzy and Chaya have experienced in the wake of the pogrom. To be fully honest, I don't believe that this play will change anyone's mind about the conflict or the talking point "conversation" happening online, but perhaps some will sit with what's said and consider that we're dealing with people who are not trying to be enemies.
Act Three does also bring us an arc we didn't realize was happening, perhaps too subtle to be the A plot, but there all the same: five of the six friends are gathered after shiva for their sixth friend, and as the scene progresses each character speaks of the last time they saw their friend in the months before. Each memory reveals a profound level of connection that showed this person had such a deep well of empathy that none of them saw their friend as the enemy, but someone to whom they could speak openly. This slow reveal is powerful and heartbreaking, and much-needed as a salve after so much anger and bitter hurt. And as they all stand together in a minyan to speak the Kaddish for their friend, their deep connection to this part of themselves is shown, too: deep in their bodies, no matter how nonpracticing they may be, these words are known, are said, without hesitation.
From a design perspective, absolutely genius choices by director Teddy Bergman and the collaboration between projection designer David Bengali and sound designer Lee Kinney. During the climactic argument, as the two women keep diving into their phones to find "evidence," the sound turns unintelligible as if the characters are speaking through water, and the walls behind them are filled with their phone screen searching: an artistic illustration that no one is actually listening to each other. It is only when they are told to put down their phones that they begin to hear.
Final thoughts: great cast, great pacing. Each act runs an hour or a little less, and for all that the evening is three and a half hours, the play never drags, and the show seems to go by fairly quickly: it's a little like A Prayer for the French Republic in that regard, though as mentioned above, not as compelling a narrative as one could wish.
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Molly Ranson as Alona, Nate Mann as Emerson, Liz Larsen
as Deborah, Eli Gelb as Noah, Molly Bernard as Izzy, Zoë
Winters as Chaya, and Hale Appleman as Lev.
Photo by Emilio Madrid. |
What: In advance of its run in Edinburgh, Reilly O'Shaughnessy's one woman show Belly runs briefly at 59E59. Belly tells the interwoven narratives of Ellie, a teenager on the swim team whose coach advises her to follow a strict (starvation) diet and exercise routine in order to win a scholarship; Katie, Ellie's aunt, currently expecting her first child and worried she will somehow ruin her fetus's health by eating the wrong food or gaining too much weight; and Susan, Katie's mother and Ellie's grandmother, a grieving widow who keeps to a very strict diet and unconsciously reinforces unhealthy attitudes toward body size and dieting on her descendants. Playwright/performer O'Shaughnessy periodically breaks the fourth wall as herself throughout the narrative of these three women as they struggle with body image issues, grief, and eating disorders, to discuss her own personal experience with them herself.
