Some of the gang celebrating their heritage in Birthright at Miami New Drama. (Photo by by Morgan Sofia Photography)
By Bill Hirschman
How do deeply held beliefs – religious, social, moral — continue to guide us, persist, deteriorate or see us mutate as time and events challenge their truth and erode the bond among groups raised on them.
Jonathan Spector’s world premiere Birthright at Miami New Drama is an overwhelming, dense and heroically ambitious study of young people defining their identity and then grapple how it copes with the modern world around them.
Like so many world premieres occurring outside Broadway’s two out-of-town tryouts and eight weeks rehearsal, the Birthright on display here needs some work that time may address.
But, rest assured, the conflicting even contradictory layers are complex enough that you will debate Spector’s arguments days later and roll it in your mind weeks from now when a newscast revives his questions in your consciousness. You can’t ask for any greater gift from theater.
Birthright is part of the Y6K New Jewish Play Initiative and Spector’s focus is on six Millennials in 2006 who have returned from a foundation-paid 10-day trip promoting the attractions of Israel.
Spector then follows their evolution over three acts as they try to reconcile the basic holdings of Judaism with the vagaries of their 21st Century lives.
The last act finds them in their mid-30s immediately after last year’s Oct. 7 Gaza horror. By then, the now divergent assemblage – some profoundly pro-Israel, some profoundly anti-Zionism – meet again, struggling to assess what they still believe.
As one says, “A good Jew is not what you believe but what you do…. Nowhere does it say that to be a good Jew you have to believe in God. It does say you have to love God which sounds like maybe a contradiction, but contradiction, that’s part of it too.”
Ironically, and crucially, like Fiddler on the Roof, the issues Spector investigates are universal and more than worthy of assessment by any group of any birthright.
Because, if we are getting the right message, what is required is accepting responsibility, both for what is happening around us and for finding the place that our beliefs lay in dealing with that schematic.
One of Spector’s moving sections depicts the one religiously lackadaisical man, transformed in the present day into a rabbi. He relates a Talmudic tale of a group at a sacrifice that basically cheers when one priest murders another priest for the opportunity to execute the sacrifice.
“This is how far they had fallen in this period, how far they had strayed that they valued the laws of ritual purity over human life.” Speaking of the mysterious death of a friend, Emerson adds, “It shifted over time but I think maybe the question of responsibility, it was it weighed on him of, of valuing the wrong things.”
It raises how Judaism and the birth of 20th Century Israel is enmeshed with the idea of creating a land that exiled Jews could return to, but then asking why the Israelis are trying to block or eject Palestinians from the same region.
A key issue that could be debated at length by patrons is how well playwright has mixed what sometimes seems like two plays. Sometimes the two facets are seamlessly merged as the religious issues and political issues are melded into the evolving lives of the maturing characters who live in an already challenging society.
Other times, characters go on protracted seemingly stand-by-themselves speeches outlining a philosophy, however cogently and central to Spector’s goal.
And other times, we get lost in the evolving and deeply confusing plebian details of their growing into true adulthood, who married who, who has an abuse problem, who’s got what job, who’s still talking to who, who has lost touch with who, and which characters are going to get nude in the hot tub.
Yet, director Teddy Bergman and his cast indubitably keep you engaged and entangled. The characters (I hope I get this right) are Lev (Hale Appleman) who Spector describes as “in search of meaning;” Emerson (Daniel Capote), in search of serenity; Izzy (Arielle Goldman), “in search of justice;” Noah (Stephen Stocking), “in search of understanding;” Chaya (Dani Stoller,) “in search of community;” and Alona (Krystal Millie Valdes,) “in search of home.”
But now some things Spector and Bergman might consider as this work gets its well-deserved second, third and fourth productions, perhaps even somewhere in New York.
To begin with, it is a verbal runaway freight of ideas whose very contradictory nature makes them hard to even begin to absorb in one sitting. You almost want to see it again just to feel like you are following it.
It’s like looking out a window when travelling by train through an endless succession of gorgeous landscapes – your brain catches one enthralling vision but the train barrels along to the next one while your brain is trying to process the last one.
It doesn’t help that with the aim of replicating the jovial confluence of intellectual friends comparing ideas over beers, Bergman has no qualm having people fire complex ideas at each other so fast and so loudly over each other that the audience cannot possibly track them. Yes, it’s a realistic depiction of a late night intellectual dorm room debate, but we have to hear at least one conversation clearly over the other.
And then there’s the debatable need for a three-hour marathon (with intermissions). It’s not just slicing a bit of dialogue here and there (although that would help); there are entire beats that fans and critics could argue are duplicative or gilding the proverbial lily.
And then there’s the decision by the playwright and or the director to have the always terrific actress Irene Adjan play Chaya’s mother as a stock stereotypical Jewish mother straight out of a sitcom. Now we’re guessing this was intentional to add a little humor to the proceedings, but it’s a little out of place in a play, even one benefiting from wit.
Spector is a California playwright whose work has been produced around the country. His 2018 Eureka Day won acclaim last year on Broadway and will be produced next season by GableStage.
In the end, neither Spector nor the characters find a one-size-fits-all answer, no sense of finding a permanent solution to the complex states of Gaza and Israel, no clear concept how their birthright plays into their current lives.
Yet in a deeply moving moment of playwrighting, direction, acting and stagecraft, the remaining five friends line up, joined for a moment to reverently say the Kaddish for the late sixth member – a prayer praising God but used in remembrance of the dead. It’s being invoked as a partial endorsement by them all in different manners of their shared birthright.
General note to the South Florida theater community: This is not applicable to every actor or even most, but this problem is widespread enough that directors across the region need to pay attention to actors’ volume and articulation. Show after show these days has actors who cannot be understood; directors ought to order their casts to take a few elocution lessons in between rehearsals.
A crucial note: Miami New Drama was kind to allow us in our coping with a busy theater weekend to let us review the second preview, the evening before opening night.
Birthright from Miami New Drama, playing through April 27 at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Shows 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sundays. Running time 3 hours including 2 intermissions. Tickets $46.50-$76.50. Visit miaminewdrama.org or https://www.colonymb.org or call (305) 674-1040.
