Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Birthright by Jonathan Spector and Balusters by David Lindsay-Abaire feature almost identical sets. Scott Pask (Birthright) and Derek McLane (Balusters) both give us living rooms in which, as we view the stage left to right, there’s a door to the exterior, a foyer, a stairway leading from the foyer up to a second floor, a wall, and, to its right, a kitchen viewed largely behind a counter. Downstage center, a sofa flanked by large, comfy chairs. The colors and designs of the furniture differ, but the layouts are the same. You could produce Balusters on the set for Birthright.

There are other resemblances. Both are ensemble plays in which the political views mutate during the course of multiple scenes. In Balusters, the time period covered is a matter of months and the ensemble is made up of a fairly diverse group of neighbors in an upscale suburb. In Birthright, the time period covered is 18 years, and the ensemble is six young Jewish adults and the mother of one of them. I admire both plays.

I was precluded from discussing Balusters publicly because I’m on the Tony nominating committee. It’s closed now, but I expect there will be productions around the country and deservedly so. Lindsay-Abaire’s script is unusually elegant. The writer is evidently more sympathetic to some characters than others, but, admirably, he has some understanding and a little forgiveness for all of them, even the antagonist, an older guy on a neighborhood association whose preservationist views partially mask values that, when examined in direct light, are none too appealing. (In a happy bit of casting, Richard Thomas, who has made a career of playing decent, honorable guys, got to play “the bad guy.” I chatted with him briefly at a function, and he was delighted by the opportunity to subvert his image.)

I was one of the early champions of Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day during its pre-pandemic run off-Broadway. I made as much noise in support of a continued life for it as I could, but none of the uptown producers at the time seemed to see what I saw. Soon after we were hit with the pandemic, which made the central conflict about vaxxing even more relevant. After the pandemic, there was a well-received production in London, and I’m guessing that had something to do with Manhattan Theater Club choosing to revive it on Broadway with a swell, starry cast, where it flourished and won a Tony Award. I notice that it’s been picked up for productions around the country. Good. I was pleased, too, to see his play, This Much I Know, which engaged history and politics with cameos from the Stalin family, striking me as an American variation on Stoppard that, frankly, I enjoyed more than most Stoppard.

Birthright refers to a program that funds the visits of groups of young American Jews to Israel in part to encourage their sense of Jewish identity as being tied to Israel. The six young people in Spector’s play have returned to the States with different takes on their experiences, but then, they are six different people and you don’t want a bunch of characters having the same takes. Over the next three-plus hours (yes, it is that long, but happily it never drags and I wasn’t conscious of the length as I watched it), we follow them and their evolving relationship with Israel, their Jewishness and their friends.

Perhaps now is a good time to mention that I am a Jewish playwright. I have two plays in anthologies of plays by Jewish-American playwrights. My mother was Jewish. My sense of humor is rooted in postwar Jewish voices. I wrote a book about Second City, a satiric theater most of whose founders were Jewish. My last name notwithstanding, by most criteria I am Jewish. What’s more, I live near West End Avenue on the Upper West Side.

But the play had the odd effect of making me feel less Jewish. I absolutely trust Spector in his depiction of what would go on between these six and what issues would come up, but I was very conscious of how few of these kinds of conversations I’ve been a party to. So, in that sense, the play taught me something about myself. I remember in Beyond the Fringe, one of the actors identified fellow castmate Jonathan Miller as a Jew. He corrected, “Not a Jew. Jewish.” By that standard, I find that I’m Jewish-ish.

There is a particularly potent passage in the third act (a new American play in three acts!) when one of the characters, Chaya, describes being thrown out of a non-profit group she founded by people she had mentored. Zoe Winters rips through the speech like a heat-seeking missile. It probably had a special impact on me because someone close to me very nearly had her career ended by someone she mentored. I once saw a cartoon representing a liberal firing squad – it was a circle of people holding rifles facing in. The passage is especially strong because Chaya realizes that one of the six was conned into signing onto the attack on her.

The play is currently running at MCC in a production enhanced by support from Sonia Friedman, so my guess is she’ll be using the extraordinary reviews it has received to raise the money to move it to a commercial run. I hope she moves it to a commercial run off-Broadway. I was disappointed when, for all of its extraordinary reviews (followed by a Pulitzer and a Tony) Bess Wohl’s Liberation closed early on Broadway. This makes me wonder how welcome Broadway would be to a play that demands even more from its audience. (Three-plus hours!)

I think Bubba Weiler’s Well, I’ll Let You Go Now may turn out to be an American classic. I saw it the first time on press seats. I paid to see it a second time, I was so struck with his accomplishment. I gather it was the second play he wrote. The first, The Saviors, has recently opened at the Atlantic Theater Company. The production – directed by Jack Serio, who also staged Well, I’ll Let You Go Now – is all a writer could possibly ask for. The play is primarily about the relationship between two altar boys, Paul and Michael, and how their Catholic upbringing collides with adolescence. (OK, I just noticed that I’m writing this week about two plays that deal with their characters’ relationship to their faiths.) I especially admired Julius Rinzel and Ivan Howe – two actors in their early adolescence – as the boys, giving meticulously detailed performances.

The problem I had was that at no point was there a question I yearned to have answered. In Well, I’ll Let You Go Now, I was gripped by learning the truth about who the man everyone was talking about actually was and how he came to die. Each scene gave me more information to combine with what I had learned before. I was a participant in the discovery. And when the final revelation came, it was a surprise that triggered a deeply moving transformation. With Saviors, what held my attention were the excellence of the performances and Weiler’s gift for behavioral detail, but I wasn’t eager to figure anything out. I hope his third play will resemble his second play more than his first.