‘Birthright’ is a mazel tov cocktail and the year’s best new play (Off Broadway review)

It’s a paradox of theater that the most universal emotions often arise out of situations rooted in the particulars of one culture or subculture. Jonathan Spector’s epic new dramedy Birthright, which premiered Monday at the MCC Theater, is a group character study of well-educated millennial Jewish Americans from the suburbs of Washington, DC, but the play taps into themes of identity, belonging, and the ebb and flow of friendships that apply to just about anyone.

We first meet the six recent college grads in the summer of 2006 shortly after they’ve all returned from a 10-day trip to Israel under the auspices of the Birthright organization, which sponsors free travel for American young adults to reconnect with their Jewish roots. They’ve gathered at a well-appointed suburban Virginia home (designed by Scott Pask and lit by Natasha Katz) that bears all the signifiers of upper-middle-class living in the aughts: the turquoise-tinted iMac computer in the corner, the living room with chair rails and textured wallpaper, the hot tub on the deck out back (which mysteriously changes positions in the second act). We catch up with them again 10 years later, in 2016, when they’ve all become more settled in their careers and, in some cases, their romantic relationships. And then in the third act we jump forward again, to 2024, months after the deadly Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023.

Spector’s play is ambitious, not only in structure but in length: Despite the 3-hour-20-minute running time (with two intermissions), it feels more like a binge watch of an engrossing limited series on your favorite streamer. It helps that the show is very, very funny — with witty characters who are quick to take comedic digs at each other that sometimes land a little too close to home. As he did in his 2018 comedy Eureka Day, a Tony winner about the squabbling progressive parents at a private elementary school in Berkeley, California, Spector deploys projections of social media posts among the group at the start of acts 2 and 3 to catch audiences up on what’s happened to the characters as well as to deliver some satirical punchlines.

The group represents a broad range of types who neatly mirror the diversity of American Jews’ attitudes toward Judaism and Israel and how they have both evolved and fractured over the last two decades. Chaya (Zoë Winters) and Izzy (Molly Bernard) have been close since they were little girls but they find themselves pulling apart in adulthood. Chaya is a former sorority girl (“a real sorority,” she insists, where she was “the Token Jew”) who’s pursuing a career in politics that will lead her to a plum job in the Obama administration, while Izzy is a progressive lesbian and social justice warrior who becomes increasingly hostile to any kind of political compromise.

Noah (Eli Gelb), a schlubby political writer whose budding career mirrors that of Nate Silver, is an inveterate peacemaker eager to see both sides of just about any argument. He also carries a not-so-secret Shabbat candle for Chaya, who occasionally rewards Noah’s romantic attentions. (A hot tub hookup between the two is one of the main reasons audiences must deposit their cellphones in Yondr pouches for the show.) Rounding out the cohort are Lev (Hale Appleman, emanating a magnetic hippie-ish energy), a perpetual seeker and (over)sensitive soul; Alona (Molly Ranson, whose wide eyes suggest both longing and a susceptibility for getting hurt), an apple-cheeked woman who ditches her Yale PhD program in sociology to return to Israel; and Emerson (Nate Mann), a budding rock star whose initial dude-ish vibe and dependency on booze and drugs gives way to some genuinely surprising changes as time passes.

Spector has great fun with signifiers from the eras of each act: the emergence of YouTube and Facebook, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, outdoor lights trigger by motion detectors, and the false belief in the inevitability of President Hillary Clinton. He captures how conversations can escalate into Crossfire-style debates with each side scrolling their phones for the perfect ammo for their next response. He also studs his scenes with humor, wry asides that feel like extensions of these hyper-educated characters and never gratuitous. Consider Noah’s sardonic assessment of Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom character: “He thinks that there’s someting wrong with all the women he dates but it’s actually because he’s this like insanely neurotic Jewish weirdo who can’t just like chill out for five fucking seconds and act normal.”

Under Teddy Bergman’s superbly nuanced direction, the drama unfolds with tightly choreographed skill — revelations and reversals and confessions and accusations and apologies following each other with the well-timed precision of stops on D.C.’s Metro line. Friends blurt out hurtful things that they regret, sometimes immediately and sometimes only upon some reflection. Others stake out positions on modern Judaism, Zionism, or Israel’s treatment of Palestinians that clearly reflect their own experiences and worldviews. (Bernard’s Izzy even voices regret for having participated in Birthright, which she later calls a “rightwing project to indoctrinate the youth” funded by major Trump donor Sheldon Adelson.) You may find yourself empathizing with some characters more than others, but Spector’s particular genius is helping us to understand why these individuals have staked themselves to their particular positions.

The cast, which also includes Liz Larsen as Chaya’s no-nonsense mom who switched from an Orthodox to a conservative schul so her daughter could read the Torah at her bat mitzvah, is sensational at capturing the social dynamics of friend groups can be reflected in one’s posture or physical bearing. With an assist from Clint Ramos’s period-perfect costumes and Robert Pickens’s wig and hair design, we grasp immediately how the time span between the acts as reshaped them as people. Gelb’s Noah, initially smart but reticent, signals his growing confidence by leaning back more instead of hunching over in a protective crouch (though Gelb also fumbled several of his lines at my performance). Winters, too, channels her eager-to-please sorority girl energy into a successful career that’s nearly undone by a DEI-loving younger generation that’s ironically less forgiving of diversity of views. And Mann, like his character, is the real sleeper: a big-hearted guy who can seem a bit dim (or just out of it) but turns out to have both real self-awareness and real depths.