American playwright Joshua Harmon has never feared putting argumentative Jews on stage. In Bad Jews the conflict was between cousins who collided after the death of their grandfather. In his latest play, first seen at New York’s Roundabout Theatre last year, the warring parties are a mother and a grandmother. That is Harmon’s mother Ellen and his Nana Renee.
“Make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible,” says Renee after telling Harmon that she knows what his next play must be.
Harmon’s response to this most personal of commissions is this gripping, funny and knotty three hander. The work spans 30 years from 1988 and is populated by Harmon (Ryan Kopel) and the two warring women in his life, Renee (Suzanne Bertish) and Ellen (Anna Francolini), a lawyer.
There is no straight line to tell the story of this family, says Harmon early on in the play’s uninterrupted hour and 45 minutes. But the framing is clear enough. The play starts with plans for Passover and it ends with a Seder that couldn’t be more car crash if a Toyota Prius had careened through the Four Questions.
In between, a family portrait is constructed in which the chilly civility of Renee and Ellen’s relationship is revealed to be the thinnest of veneers.
Renee is the inspiring, fun, irreverent grandmother who would take young Joshua to inappropriate films and exhibitions. One winces at the thought of the ten-year-old standing in a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition. Another exhibition consists of a bar of soap with pubic hair attached. And then there was the production of Medea with a terrifying Diana Rigg in the title role. It was the formative experience that the narrator credits for being a playwright.
“Would you kill your children?” asks Joshua after the play, a question inspired by Medea’s actions. “Depends on the circumstances,” says Renee. It is an early clue that this Brooklyn-born Jewish mother is nothing like the Jewish archetype. Her alcohol addiction is another.
However, Harmon is too good a writer to allow his work to fall into such easily definable genres as the misery memoir. As anyone who has seen Bad Jews knows, his writing is as sharp as his pen and he has the ability to create often eye-wateringly vicious arguments, not out of an urge to make his play dramatic, but from knowing the depth of his characters’ resentments.
As the writer, Kopel captures the mild-mannered wit of the author while Bertish embodies the blithe disregard for how her behaviour effects everyone around her.
Of the three however, Francolini’s portrayal of Harmon’s hard-working mom is the pick. It is a performance brimful of suppressed rage that the author only belatedly realises is probably just what his beloved Nana deserves.
Hampstead Theatre, Downstairs, to July 4
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.