On a narrow, winding street in Manhattan’s West Village, a sign of hope: A production that went dark just before Christmas, when the Omicron variant came into town, has reopened at the Cherry Lane Theater.
Sure, that’s what comedian Alex Edelman’s publicists said would happen when his solo show, “Just for Us,” abruptly ended that in December, promising a return on January 24. But when a production goes into pandemic hibernation, it’s easy to worry it won’t show up again.
The return of ‘Just for Us’ is therefore a jubilant development, all the more because it is a laughable show. A smooth, clever provocation of a monologue, it deals with race and identity in American culture, and the tantalizing impulse to reach across the chasm to the hard-core bigots among us.
Like the white supremacists who, Edelman tells us, tweeted a public invitation to a meeting they had in Queens — but when he took them in, he went like an undercover officer. Hoping that no one would realize he was Jewish, he didn’t exactly have unity in mind. But then he saw an attractive woman he calls Chelsea and decided to chat with her.
“I thought to myself, without irony, you never know,” he says, his eyes widening at his own idiocy.
He interweaves the story of that pre-pandemic gathering, which began with the rallying racists lamenting the then-recent marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with a memory from his early childhood: the time when his mother, who wanted a bereaved friend comfort, decided that their Orthodox Jewish family would organize a Christmas celebration for her, complete with presents and a tree. With a dreidel on it.
Is the dreidel detail true? A decoration? Anyway, it works. Tom Stoppard makes a similar joke in his recent epic play “Leopoldstadt”, only there the treetopper is a Star of David. The two shows are apples and oranges, but anti-Semitism and assimilation are big themes in both. Stoppard writes about historical Nazis, while Edelman belittles 21st century bigots as ‘nerf Nazis’: pathetic wannabes. “These are not the winners of life,” he says.
Directed by Adam Brace, “Just for Us” is an inherently political piece from a comedian who says he tends to avoid politics on stage. (“Because everyone is devastated!” Edelman bellows near the beginning.) It’s about whiteness, the privileges that come with it, and the hierarchy that—as he saw growing up in Boston—view Mayflower descendants as an ambitious American ideal.
More philosophically, the show pokes and pokes at empathy and morality, and the ways other entire categories of people make it easy to dehumanize them. That’s a very pertinent observation amid this ideologically polarized public health crisis.
“It’s so hard to hate up close,” says Edelman, but of course that’s not true for everyone. The white supremacists at the meeting, it turned out, seemed to have no problem hating him. Which was irritating, because part of him wanted them to like him. And yes, he knows that’s absurd.
Edelman ends “Just for Us” with a wonderfully funny high: by talking about his petty, perfect revenge against the white supremacists. The show itself is a new revenge – bigger, bolder and with the Cherry Lane audience firmly on its side.
Just for us
Until February 19 at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Manhattan; cherrylanetheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
