Bad Jews

PRAISE FOR THE PLAYS OF Joshua Harmon

BAD JEWS

“There’s nothing like a death in the family to bring out the worst in people. This unhappy truth is displayed with delectably savage humor in Bad Jews.”

—CHARLES ISHERWOOD, The New York Times, Critics’ Pick

“Conflicts of modernity and tradition function within any cultural framework, and with its canny humor and vibrant characterizations, Bad Jews offers a radioactive brew of neuroses and glee for audiences of all stripes.”

—JORDAN RIEFE, The Hollywood Reporter

“Bad Jews is delicious, nasty fun.”

—ELIZABETH VINCENTELLI, New York Post

“‘Survival’ is a recurring theme in Bad Jews, Joshua Harmon’s generously envenomed, no-blow-too-low cage match of full-contact identity politics, and, no matter how richly contemptible the combatants get, no matter how cocooned and blinkered and implosively selfish they prove themselves to be, we never doubt they’re fighting for their lives.”

—SCOTT BROWN, Variety

“The humor does more than entertain—it vexes and disturbs while challenging simplistic distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’”

—CHARLES MCNULTY, Los Angeles Times

“Rather brilliant … As badly as these Jews behave to one another, there is something life affirming about how they grapple with the legacy of their grandfather’s experience. And with Auschwitz casting a shadow over even the funniest moments of this comedy, you can’t ask more of a play than for life to be affirmed.”

—JOHN NATHAN, The Jewish Chronicle

“The conflict is vicious, the comedy bruising, but Harmon ensures that we see the grief and heartache that drives it.”

—SARAH HEMMING, Financial Times

“A ferocious domestic drama … Harmon has a talent to endure.”

—MICHAEL BILLINGTON, The Guardian

“Brilliant technique … It’s a strange, raw, obsessive creature … which features numerous passages of uproarious dialogue.”

—LLOYD EVANS, The Spectator

“An exhilarating drama—gritty, but with a touchingly human heart.”

—JANE SHILLING, The Telegraph

“Joshua Harmon’s play uses sharp comedy to probe the sort of questions of identity that usually get treated with dry solemnity.”

—HENRY HITCHINGS, Evening Standard

“A hilarious new comedy … It’s a recipe for absolute disaster and Harmon cleverly builds to a cataclysmic bust-up.”

—DAISY BOWIE-SELL, Time Out London

SIGNIFICANT OTHER

“An absolutely wonderful new play. Entirely delightful … a tenderly unromantic romantic comedy … as richly funny as it is ultimately heart stirring.”

—CHARLES ISHERWOOD, The New York Times, Critics’ Pick

“Uproarious and poignant…a masterpiece of comic anxiety … A smart new American romantic comedy … a rare thing indeed and worth celebrating.”

—ADAM FELDMAN, Time Out, Critic’s Pick

“This is a honey of a play … fresh and surprisingly affecting … Significant Other brings intelligence, humor, and penetrating observation to relatable contemporary characters.”

—DAVID ROONEY, The Hollywood Reporter

“A tart, melancholy romantic comedy.”

—Vogue

“Nigh-perfect … one of the most astutely observed contemporary works about loneliness and the eternal quest for companionship… Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other has tremendous universality.”

—DAVID GORDON, Theatermania

JOSHUA HARMON’s play Bad Jews received its world premiere at Roundabout Underground, transferred to the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, and has since become one of the most produced plays in the United States. International productions include Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, South Africa and London’s West End, following sell-out runs at Theatre Royal Bath and the St. James. Other plays include Ivanka, which had readings at theatres across the country on Election Eve 2016, and Significant Other, which had its world premiere at Roundabout and transferred to Broadway in 2017. Joshua Harmon has received fellowships from MacDowell, Atlantic Center for the Arts and NNPN. He is a graduate of Juilliard and is under commission from Roundabout, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Lincoln Center Theater.

ALSO BY JOSHUA HARMON

Significant Other

Copyright

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that all materials in this book, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. The stock and amateur performance rights in the English language throughout the United States, and its territories and possessions, Canada, and the Open Market are controlled by Dramatists Play Service, Inc. No professional or nonprofessional performances of the plays herein (excluding first class professional performance) may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission. Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to Scott Chaloff, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.

This edition first published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2017 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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Copyright © 2017 by Joshua Harmon

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-4683-1658-2

Contents

Praise For The Plays Of Joshua Harmon

About the Author

Also By Joshua Harmon

Copyright

Preface

Characters

Chapter 1

Atlantis— A Lost Sonnet

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder that a whole city— arches, pillars, colonnades, not to mention vehicles and animals— had all one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then. Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.

— EAVAN BOLAND

“Am I a Jew? Yes, I’m a Jew. But I’m not, I really have no religion, you know what I mean? I’m just Jewish in that it like oozes out of my pores uncontrollably.”

— SARAH SILVERMAN

Preface

Dear Reader,

I’m depressed.

It’s the summer of 2016. We’re in the middle of the most acrimonious American presidential campaign in history. The front page of The New York Times this week featured President Obama saying that the trends for global warming are, and I quote, “terrifying.” And I recently had a mole removed from my shoulder because I got scared it would turn cancerous, but the scar it’s leaving is bigger and redder than I thought it would be and I hate it.

That’s what’s on my mind as I sit down to write this preface. From where you sit, you had probably never heard of me until you heard of my play, or saw my play on a shelf in a bookstore or a library, and pulled it down to read it. You first came to know me as a published, produced playwright.

But I have spent much more time in my life being unknown, unproduced, unsuccessful, and anxious. Before Bad Jews, the longest run a play of mine had ever had was three nights, at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, NY, in a space called “The Wedge,” aptly named, as it was a literal wedge of the lobby they cordoned off so young artists could have small productions of their work. Today, five years after writing the first draft of Bad Jews, the play has been produced around the world. There are South African Daphnas and Canadian Liams, Israeli Melodys and Australian Jonahs. To go from a three-night run in a corner of a lobby to productions happening in multiple time zones simultaneously is a very strange feeling, to say the least.

It’s even stranger because I wrote the play for myself, in total obscurity, with no sense it would ever get produced. It began as privately as anything could. I came up with the title when I was in college, and began taking notes on the characters. When I look back through my notebook at those first notes from 2005, there is Daphna Feygenbaum’s name, staring back at me. Where did she come from? I don’t know. A year later, I was back in New York, riding the subway, and suddenly realized that Melody should sing “Summertime.” Where did that come from? Again, I don’t know.

Six years would pass, as I toiled in day jobs and part-time jobs and went to graduate school, where I wrote other plays. Finally, in 2011, after I realized a different play I’d been writing was not meant to be (aka: garbage), and feeling dejected, I sat down to try writing a draft of this play. I had nothing to lose. I began the draft on a residency at the MacDowell Colony, and finished it just before my 28th birthday, in Atlanta, where I had a year-long fellowship at Actor’s Express, thanks to the National New Play Network. When I finished that first draft, I was convinced it was the worst thing I had ever written. Driving to the airport on I-75, to fly back to New York for the first read-through of the play, in the throes of a full-on panic attack, I called a friend and, with the windows down, started screaming, “I’m a fraud! I’m a failure.” Today, that is a fond memory.

Less fond is recalling that during previews for the London premiere, I had to change a line of dialogue. Toward the end of the play, Daphna says, “Now when it’s easier to be Jewish than it’s ever been in the history of the world, now when it’s safest, now we should all stop?” But the London premiere came just after the January 2015 attacks in Paris at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, where four Jews were gunned down and murdered. The line rang false. It didn’t feel safe to be Jewish anymore.

I feel very close to this play, not simply because I wrote it, or because it is the first play of mine to really go out into the world, but because, even though it is a work of fiction, it comes from a very deep place within. I wasn’t conscious of the questions with which I was grappling at the time I wrote the play, but looking back I see with more clarity what I was trying to understand, and what I will probably be trying to understand the rest of my life: Why was I born a Jew? What is the value of Judaism today? What does it mean when someone born a Jew moves away from the religion, and chooses not to pass it on to the next generation? What does it mean to watch something go extinct?

Like many theatre kids, I put on my first plays in my parents’ living room, with my two younger sisters. If I didn’t write roles for them, we would not have had plays to perform. Thus, I was trained, from an early age, to create roles for Jewish women. Though neither of my sisters has continued acting outside our parents’ home (though both were excellent!), I unconsciously still have them in the back of my mind whenever I write. So it’s with a mixture of pride and bewilderment that I realize, in writing a role either of my sisters could have played, an opportunity was created for fiercely intelligent, deeply feeling, ethnic Jewish women the world over to stand at the center of a play and demand an audience’s attention.

Now my preface draws to a close. When I sat down to write it, I was, as you know, feeling down. But I feel better now. I think that’s because, in remembering the genesis of Bad Jews, I am reminded of the people who played a role in bringing it to life, people I love very much. People like Daniel Aukin, my director extraordinaire; the original cast: Tracee Chimo, Philip Ettinger, Molly Ranson, and Michael Zegen, who performed the play over two years with so much depth of feeling and honesty; Todd Haimes, Robyn Goodman, Jill Rafson, Josh Fiedler, and everyone at Roundabout, who produced the play so beautifully; everyone at Actor’s Express, especially Freddie Ashley, and everyone from that first workshop, especially Carlyn Aquiline; my agent, Scott Chaloff; my parents, sisters, and friends, who were always on the other side of the phone. Without people to bring it to life, a play is just a few pieces of paper.

I hope these few pieces of paper will mean something to you. I cannot ask for more than that. But if I can, then I also hope Donald Trump will not become our next President. And that global warming will not destroy us all. And that the scar on my shoulder gets smaller as it heals. And I hope you, dear reader, are having a very nice day, wherever you are.

—JOSHUA HARMON

August 2016

P.S. The book is finally going to press in April 2017. And he won. There’s nothing much to say about it, I suppose, except, pray for us.

The world premiere of Bad Jews was produced in New York City by Roundabout Theatre Company (Todd Haimes, Artistic Director, Harold Wolpert, Managing Director, Julia C. Levy, Executive Director) as part of Roundabout Underground at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre on October 30, 2012.

The Off-Broadway premiere was produced in New York City by Roundabout Theatre Company (Todd Haimes, Artistic Director, Harold Wolpert, Managing Director, Julia C. Levy, Executive Director) at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre on September 19, 2013.

Director Daniel Aukin

CAST

Characters

DAPHNA FEYGENBAUM, 22, Liam & Jonah’s first cousin. 2/3 body, 1/3 hair. Thick, intense, curly, frizzy, long brown hair. Hair that clogs a drain after one shower. Hair you find on pillows and in corners of the room and in your refrigerator six months after the head from which it grew last visited. Hair that could not be straightened even if you had four hours and three hairdressers double-fisting blow driers. Hair that screams: Jew.

LIAM HABER, 25, Daphna’s cousin: his mother is the sister of Daphna’s father. Wire-rim glasses. U of Chicago Asian studies Ph.D. student. Former Fulbright scholar in Japan. Has as much of a sense of humor as an overdue library book.

JONAH HABER, 21, Liam’s younger brother. Sometime-UVM sophomore. Less lanky than his brother. Less brainy. More brawn. More heart.

MELODY, 24, Liam’s girlfriend. Short, stick-straight blonde hair. Which she wears with a barrette. To be extra cute. Mousy. She looks like someone who would have been abducted when she was nine but returned to her parents unharmed. Works for a non-profit.

March. Not quite winter, not quite spring.

A studio apartment on the Upper West Side. A pull-out sofa (which is pulled out), a full air mattress, which has been inflated, and a twin air mattress, which has not been set-up. Guests are coming, preparations have been made.

JONAH, in boxers, black socks and a button down, sits cross legged, playing a video game. His suit jacket and pants are balled up somewhere in the room.

After a Moment, he hits pause. Beat. Then he stands up and presses his forehead against the window, which looks out on the Hudson River.

The bathroom door opens, which sends JONAH back to his video game. DAPHNA FEYGENBAUM emerges from the bathroom in pajamas.

DAPHNA

I’m sorry but I still, I mean— you can see the Hudson River! From the bathroom! This apartment …

Really, Jonah? Boxers and black socks? Is that supposed to do it for me?

Let me— I would never want you to do it for me, you’re my cousin and, gross. Just, like, if you’re at all interested in people of the opposite sex who are not your cousins?