One evening in 2017, Alex Edelman thought it might be fun to infiltrate a meeting of white supremacists. Or if not fun exactly, maybe it would make a good story.
At an apartment in Queens, with 16 bigots and one undercover Jewish comedian sitting on folding chairs, the origin story of Edelman’s one-man comedy-theater show “Just for Us” began.
Written and re-rewritten to touch on the latest examples of antisemitism now regularly a part of the news cycle, “Just for Us” has been a hit on Broadway (where the New York Times included it in its Best Theater of 2023 roundup), at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in London.
Credit: Matthew Murphy
Credit: Matthew Murphy
Now on a limited national tour, it comes to the Alliance Theatre for three nights Jan. 5-7.
“I specifically asked about touring in Atlanta,” Edelman said in a telephone interview. “It’s well known as one of the big comedy towns in the United States.”
“Just for Us” is part of the amorphous genre sometimes called “comedy-theater hybrid,” a form of extended storytelling that has included Mike Birbiglia, Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg. Birbiglia is a producer of the show and encouraged Edelman to shape it away from pure stand-up and more toward storytelling.
“It’s comedy for people who love comedy and theater for people who love theater,” he says. “It tries to be a little bit of both to thread that needle a little bit.”
Which means that the story of that original white supremacist meeting six years ago is the spine of the show, but also that Edelman, a rather hyperactive performer, weaves in and out of it the main narrative with what the Times called his “three-jokes-per-minute, rabbi-on-Ritalin aesthetic.”
Which matters more, the story or the jokes? On the one hand, when he was performing the show on Broadway, he kept a dry erase board backstage with the self-scrawled admonition, “The story is the star.”
“Yeah, that is exactly how I feel about it,” Edelman says. “Ultimately at the center of it there is this propulsive narrative.”
On the other hand, “All my stuff has to kill. All my stuff has to be really funny. You’re getting jokes every few seconds. The laughs to me are the bare minimum. Funny comes first. If the show’s not funny there’s nothing for you.”
Got that?
Edelman, 34, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Boston, or as he says in the show, he’s from “this really racist part of Boston called Boston.” He started doing standup comedy at 15 and spent a year in a yeshiva in Jerusalem after high school. At New York University he joined the comedy group Upright Citizens Brigade and started writing for TV comedies and performing one-man shows, including “Millennial,” which won Best Newcomer at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe Festival, and “Everything Handed to You.”
Then, back before Twitter changed its name to X, he got into a Twitter fight with another user who attacked him for being Jewish. The Twitter anti-Semites showed up to pile on, but that only made Edelman double down. He created a list of antisemitic commenters on the platform and trolled them by calling them the “Jewish National Fund Contributors.” It was from that group that he heard about the small meeting of white nationalists in 2017, and thus, “Just for Us.”
The “us” in the show’s title is deliberately ambiguous, he says, and may or may not be readily apparent to audiences after they see it. “There are multiple definitions or possible readings for that. And I’ve heard some readings that I’ve never thought of before recently.”
One of the tensions in the show, and a possible factor in the ambiguity of “us,” is the relationship between being Jewish and being white, and how complicated that identity can be.
The show was already taped by HBO when it ran on Broadway and will stream on the Max platform in spring 2024, he says. The tour will continue through February and then he plans to “take a long nap and figure out what to do next.”
Will he retire the material once it has been exposed nationally on TV?
“I sure hope so,” he replies.
THEATER PREVIEW
“Just for Us”
Jan. 5-7. $35-$125. Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4600, alliancetheatre.org.
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