Playwright explores identity issues in ‘Bad Jews’

Joshua Harmon’s play “Bad Jews,” opening this week at the Actor’s Express, is imbued with Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but it was born in Atlanta.

The playwright, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s dramatic writing program, won a fellowship from the National New Play Network in 2010, which gave him a year with Atlanta’s Actor’s Express to develop a new work.

The play concerns warring cousins, Daphna and Liam, and an explosive fight seemingly over a family artifact, but also over a question: What does it mean to be Jewish? Liam’s brother Jonah and Liam’s non-Jewish girlfriend Melody are the only other characters in the one-act play.

Harmon answered three questions about “Bad Jews.”

Q: Can you talk about working in Atlanta?

A: I found Atlanta to be a tremendously supportive and encouraging environment, and I feel such gratitude to Actor's Express and to Freddie (artistic director Freddie Ashley) for taking a chance on me when I was a complete unknown and giving me a home for a year. It was clearly a year that changed my life.

It was also a profound time in the life of Actor’s Express. During the 2010-11 season, they had some major financial setbacks, and had an emergency fundraising campaign to keep the doors open. To watch a community rally around the theater and fight for its survival was such a lesson to me about what is required for a theater to exist at all.

Q: What do you think of Daphna’s concerns about watering down the “Jewishness” of American Judaism by marrying outside the religion?

A: That's a highly charged question. The Pew Center did a study of American Judaism in the fall of 2013 which seemed to really unnerve many in the community. The big statistic was that 71 percent of non-Orthodox Jews are marrying outside the faith. That's almost three-quarters of the population. I mean, any way you slice that statistic, that is a population in peril … .

Our world is becoming increasingly globalized and less interested in the particular identities of smaller cultures and ethnic groups. So I think this question of watered-down or disappearing Judaism isn’t particular to Jews. It is a question we are all facing. And as with all things in life, when change comes, something is lost and something is gained, but I think the play resonates for a lot of people around the country (and now around the world — it’s getting its second production in the UK right now) because it’s something we’re all wondering about: What do we do with the identities we were given at birth? Do we pass them along? Or do we let them go? And if we let them go, what exactly are we losing?

Q: Will Atlanta’s audience respond to this as intensely as a New York audience does?

A: I hope so! The play is about a very specific generation of Jews living in a very particular location at a very particular moment in history, but it is my firm belief that the more specific one is, the more likely that one taps into something which is universal.