No, it’s not that birthright controversy, the one the Supreme Court is supposed to decide this week, despite birthright citizenship being guaranteed in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Playwright Jonathan Spector writes about another birthright in his great, controversial and very funny new play, which opened Monday at the MCC Theater after its 2024 world premiere at Miami New Drama.
“Birthright” easily takes its place as the best new play of the year (so far), and one of its longest. Clocking in at three hours 20 minutes, this sprawling three-act play spans nearly two decades to chart the various fortunes of six twentysomething friends who go to Israel free-of-charge for 10 days under the auspices of Taglit-Birthright Israel, and never fully recover from the experience. The respective acts take place in 2006, 2016 and 2024.
“Birthright” can best be described as a Jewish “Big Chill,” with the third act of Spector’s play being the meeting that brings five of the six friends together to mourn a recent death in their group. It’s as if “Big Chill” director Lawrence Kasdan had also made two prequels that starred Kevin Costner (famously cut from the 1983 film classic). In “The Big Chill,” Glenn Close & Company talk about what went right or wrong, and not just with their dead friend. In “Birthright,” what goes awry is not just talked about, it’s brilliantly dramatized. With the exception of Jeff Goldblum’s Michael Gold journalist in “The Big Chill,” Kasdan’s characters are gentile, if not downright very waspy. Their upper-upper-middle-class problems are not really problems for the vast majority of people.
Since they’re Jewish, Spector’s six friends carry a lot more angst, and adding to all that tsoris is their just having returned from Israel in 2006 as George W. Bush’s war in Iraq continues to roil the world. Their birthright trip to Israel was a fun, expense-free vacation. It featured lots of sightseeing, drinking and sex. One of the six actually managed to lose her virginity to an Israeli soldier who makes a habit of scoring with young Americans in the Taglit program.
In Act 1, the friends meet, ostensibly, to dissuade that former virgin from giving up her doctoral studies in the United States to move to Israel. The birthright trip was amazing, they tell her, but not life-changing. She disagrees. Clearly, the situation is ripe for exploring all sorts of questions about the state of Israel and the state of being a Jew, and Spector is wonderful at writing with both his left and right hand, if not speaking out of both sides of his mouth at once. Long speeches abound, but they are great, often very witty digressions into some of the world’s weightiest topics. It’s an affluent group of friends, but at least these characters realize they’re speaking from a place of privilege.
Along the way, this gang of six drops a lot of Hebrew words, and Spector is thoughtful enough to explain (eventually) what each foreign word means without being too obvious with his explanations and exposition.
Spector sets Act 2 in 2016 on the eve of the Clinton/Trump presidential race, and Act 3 in 2024, just enough time after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre for the Israel/Gaza crisis to have divided old friends, as well as entire families. Only the sudden, unexpected death of a beloved friend could bring them all back together. How explosive does it get? Spector lets it be known that the late Sheldon Adelman helped fund Taglit-Birthright Israel.
This review hasn’t mentioned any of the actors because a true joy of sitting through all three-plus hours of “Birthright” is witnessing first-hand where Spector takes his characters. That actor-character relationship should first be seen in the theater, not read in a review.
In a couple of cases, it’s possible that Spector has written not female characters but a couple of talking heads: one pro-Israel, the other pro-Palestine. If so, Teddy Bergman’s direction of his cast softens those hard lines. Much more audacious is Spector’s creation of two male characters, both of whom emerge as the play’s most religious characters, if studying to become a rabbi or actually becoming one is a sign of religious devotion. Both men experience the greatest, most wonderfully theatrical changes in personality during the course of “Birthright.” If this is meant as a not-so-subtle critique linking religion to fanaticism, it works.
On the New York stage, Bergman last directed Lauren Yee’s “Mother Russia,” the only new play this year to match the thrill of seeing “Birthright.” Not only is his taste in plays downright flawless, Bergman knows how to bring a comic, wry edge to even the most serious of subjects.
At long last, the enormously talented cast of “Birthright” features Molly Bernard, Eli Gelb, Nate Mann, Molly Ranson, Zoë Winters and the enormously charismatic Hale Appleman as the six friends. Liz Larsen plays the generous Jewish mother whose house (great set by Scott Pask) is the scene of all the drama.
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