If I hadn’t met
the playwright at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre after his show, I would swear
Larry David, not Larry Jay Tish, was the author. THE LAST JEWS: An Apocalyptic
Comedy (playing through May 11th) has Curb Your Enthusiasm
irreverence written all over it. And that’s a compliment. It’s not
easy to send up the world and its atrocities without sounding callous.
Director
Margaret Ann Brady finds the perfect comic tone for the material: It’s not at
all dismissive of the pain we inflict on each other but she taps into an
absurdist vein (the one right next to the pain) which has us shaking our heads
while we’re laughing at the crazy premise: Canada, believe it or not, is the
aggressor (in some future time warp). They’ve attributed the ozone problem in
the Northwest Territories
to methane in the Jewish community for some wacky reason…so the Sierra Club has
stepped in to save the endangered Jews.
We meet two
young, dedicated Sierra operatives who have located the very last Jews in North America and brought them to a “safe zone” where
they can start repopulating. They’re still saving whales and penguins, mind
you, but they’ve added homo sapiens to their list. When Morty asks how they
found him, the young activist says it was easy. He just tracked supermarket
data, Chinese food take-out orders and J-Date websites. The hitch to the Sierra
plan is that the woman they’ve abducted (for her own good, of course) knows
Morty. She was married to him. Oy veh! You can see where this is going, can’t
you?
Tish keeps the
adventure light, even adding a Brothers Grimm deus ex machina discovery device
to insure a happy ending…but at the same time, we’re fully aware that genocide
does occur now, today, in many places in the world so that happy ending isn’t
really so happy after all.
Ellen Colton is
delightful as the spunky woman they kidnap for Chuck Schwager’s bewildered
Morty. Alexandria King and Aiden Kinney are charmingly intense as the very
serious Sierra workers and Brad Kelly’s video design for the television news
broadcasts is an effective and awfully clever comic coup. Mazel Tov.
