Rabbi sees merit in play about Jews gone bad
Boy, was I glad I brought a rabbi to this play.
Joshua Harmon’s much-produced 2012 play Bad Jews is billed by the Harold Green Jewish Theatre as “poignant and viciously funny.” Heavy on the vicious. In it, the 20-something cousins Daphna (Sarah SegalLazar) and Liam (Jamie Elman) go head to head over an heirloom that belonged to their just-deceased grandfather, as Liam’s brother Jonah (Jake Goldsbie) and girlfriend Melody (Ellen Denny) try not to get pulled into the fray.
The play’s provocative title prompted me to invite Edward Elkin, rabbi of Toronto’s First Narayever Congregation, to see it with me, figuring that someone who’s pretty much by definition a good Jew would be able to respond with insight to whatever badness goes on. I was very grateful to process the show’s emotional intensity in conversation afterwards.
Is what happens in the play familiar to him?
“I can’t recall a situation where there was a conflict over one particular object,” Elkin says, “but I’ve certainly been involved with families where in the wake of a death, conflicts … all come together.”
The play’s characters, in my view, desperately need mediation: they don’t really know how to act responsibly as adults yet, and the situation goes from bad to worse as Daphna relentlessly pursues her own interests.
What would Elkin have done if he could have intervened? “I don’t think my role would have been to provide the answer of which grandchild should inherit that particular object,” he says. “I think I would try to help them see that the last thing they are doing is honouring their grandfather’s memory” by fighting so much. Helping them to find some compromise would be his goal, though “I don’t know what the compromise would be.”
The play takes place the night before the family sits shiva for their beloved Poppy, a recognizably tension-filled situation. “People are vulnerable because family relationships are being rejigged in the absence of this person who meant so much to everybody,” Elkin says. If tempers do flare in such situations, “I encourage people to focus on what the person would have wanted, which is almost always not bitterness, recriminations, conflict and all that.”
When I ask him if it was hard for him to see a play that repre- sents Jews behaving badly, he points to “a long line of literature and drama” in a similar vein; for example the work of Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler.
Their novels “have aroused some consternation in the Jewish community because they make us look bad. I can relate to feeling a little bit of discomfort, but I get that whether it’s a playwright or novelist or poet, they have to speak the truth that they see — and their art would be much less interesting if they didn’t, if it was just a Hallmark card paper trail.”
An important aspect of the play is that Poppy was a Holocaust survivor, and his death and absence struck Elkin as representative of the current “period of transition.”
“Everybody is acutely aware that just as in the action of this play, the generation of survivors is very quickly fading from the scenes.” … One of the many themes I think that comes across in the piece is how do we continue to honour the memory of those who are lost?
“Ritualizing events that happened to our ancestors is something that we have a lot of practice with,” Elkin continues, making reference to Passover and Hanukkah. “Is the Holocaust the same in some ways or is it different?”
The production has been programmed here in Toronto to coincide with Holocaust Awareness Week, and several of the performances are followed by talkbacks in partnership with the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre.
While it’s at times tough to watch, Elkin says that he would recommend the play, bringing up a point at which Daphna and Liam lock horns around questions of legacy.
She in essence argues that she’s the better Jew because she is observant and soon to move to Israel, while Liam is dating a gentile.
Daphna “was speaking to the importance of Jewish continuity and the price to be paid if Jews don’t care enough to maintain their identity,” says Elkin, which “is a very real and alive issue for me and what I do in my life.”
At the same time, what Liam “had to say about some difficult aspects of the tradition … ‘Why would I sacrifice someone I love for the sake of something that I don’t really believe?’ … that’s also real. And I found that exchange would provide some useful opportunities for conversation.”
Bad Jews, produced by Montreal’s Segal Centre for the Performing Arts, continues at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, 5040 Yonge St., through Nov. 11. See hgjewishtheatre.com or call 416-932-9995, ext. 224.
Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. At the Theatre With ... is an occasional series in which she brings people with specialist perspectives to performances. Follow her on Twitter: @KarenFricker2