There’s a lot you’ll quickly recognize in Stephen Laughton’s play One Jewish Boy.
It has that very British feel of a relationship-through-time play. You know, a play that unravels the story of a couple often through a series of vignettes that skip backwards through time (Nick Payne’s Constellations or even Betrayal by Harold Pinter - come to mind)?
There’s also the antisemitism, the frustrating core of the play, will likely feel all too present and of the moment.
You’ll also feel, in this Echo Theater Company production, that confident minimalist style that energizes so many of their plays.
All this is clear and immediate. What Mr. Laughton does with all this is slightly less clear and maybe even frustrating.
One Jewish Boy tracks the relationship of Alex and Jesse across just more than 15 years from a shared joint on a beach in Ibiza through the seeming destruction of their relationship. The dramatic fulcrum for all of this is an antisemitic attack on Jesse, the Jewish ‘boy’, that happens after they fall in love. This attack emotionally devastates Jesse, which, we could read as the beginning of the dissolution of his relationship.
But Mr. Laughton has Jesse paired with Alex, who’s a mixed-race woman, in this English middle-brow society. The identity politics should get complicated fairly quickly but for reasons that never become entirely clear - they don’t. One Jewish Boy is true to its title in being very focused on one Jewish boy (notably, not Jewish man).
How you react to that, in some ways is going to speak more to who you are than about the play. There’s the temptation, as there is with any breakup, to want to pick a side, to determine whose fault it is. The play frustrates that desire in ways that feel both intentional and unintentional. Intentionally, it provides us with a complicated couple where for every announced evil that Jesse suffers from antisemitism, there’s another world of unannounced slights we imagine Alex suffers as a woman who is half-Black in a white man’s society. The play begins to play with this idea near the end but never gives it full breath. Unintentionally, the play brings this question almost to a head, as if to say ‘yes, this is a play about identity politics and the seen and unseen collisions,' only to jump to the earliest moment of their relationship on an Ibiza beach - as if to say, ‘no, it’s just about a relationship.’
My guess is you’re going to find the play frustrating either because, to you, the antisemitism is so clear and consuming that it is everything... or you’re going to be frustrated because there is so much more going unsaid and unexplored that you wish the play covered.
This isn’t to say it’s a frustrating production. It’s a beautifully simple, confident, well-acted production - it just feels like either something’s missing or there’s too much there. I’ll let you and your seat mate argue about this after the 90 minutes show.
One Jewish Boy. plays at the Echo Theater Company in Atwater Village through April 28th.