After The Argument Comes The Rest Of Your Lives

The actor Eli Gelb has really found a niche for himself as "unassuming guy in a three-hour play who's able to avoid getting directly hit by the drama." Before catching him in Birthright, the new off-Broadway play from Jonathan Spector, I'd last seen Gelb as the sound engineer Grover in the Tony-winning Stereophonic.

In that play, which https://defector.com/stereophonic-is-the-fleetwood-mac-play-and-so-much-better-for-it">was clearly inspired by the making of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, he begins the job ambitious and a little naive before the bad behavior of rock stars forces him to grow some protective layers.

In Birthright, Gelb's character Noah has a similar professional drive, and he, too, has a core earnestness that you don't want to see overridden by a more convenient posture of cynicism.

A viewer might appreciate the satisfaction of an ending like the one in Stereophonic, which sees him rediscovering what gave his work meaning in the first place.

But Birthright doesn’t pretend to offer any easy closure.

It would be a real writerly heat check to compare the making of Rumours to Judaism: There's all this arguing, and these wild stories, and it all leads to a beautiful, lasting thing that brings a lot of disparate folks together, and also serves as a kind of mythical ideal of what a group of inherently flawed people could be at their best.

Luckily, I would never do that.

But Birthright does feel like a play on an epic journey to justify the importance of the religion at a time when some of its adherents use it to justify the killing of children.

For some audience members, the play will succeed in that mission, and for others I think it will fall short.

Neither of those groups, in my eyes, would be wrong.

Birthright covers the evolution of a friend group who came together in their early 20s on a trip to Israel.

Broken neatly into three briskly paced hour-long acts, the first part takes place a few weeks after their return to the U.S., in the middle of George W. Bush's second term.

The middle section is the night before a wedding in October 2016, unknowingly on the eve of the Trump years, and then the last part takes place in the near-present, well after the events of Oct. 7, 2023.

In the beginning, the characters share some misgivings about the political weirdness of the Birthright program and the way it might try to show college kids that living in Israel is just a big cool party, but those are mostly eclipsed by more pressing questions like "Am I going to hook up again with the person I hooked up with over there?" In the second act, our cast can't ignore the obvious alliance between Trump's presidential run and Israeli nationalism, but they still mostly have their own crap to deal with.

In the third act, however, it's no longer possible to ignore the big questions: They're living in a time when every informed person has to have an opinion about the campaign in Gaza, and these friends are nowhere near as aligned as they once were when the topics were domestic American issues.