“Are you Jewish?” requested writer-performer, comic, and, as of this month, Broadway star Alex Edelman, midway by means of our dialog. We’d been speaking about his hit solo present whereas making a circuit across the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, one in every of Edelman’s favourite locations in New York. (His enjoyment was apparent and infectious: Over the course of our afternoon, he would photobomb a bunch of teenagers taking a mirror selfie, bemusedly watch a public dance set up, and argue with a 5-going-on-6-year-old concerning the materials of her gown, which she referred to as plastic and he labeled “some type of polyester mix.”) I answered his query within the affirmative, with some shock. I didn’t thoughts that he requested. However amid our dialog about Jewish identification, Jewish males, Jewish efficiency, and Jewish shtick, I assumed he had made an assumption about me. I assumed, with out ever articulating it, that we—sitting collectively within the reproduction of a room owned by aristocratic Europeans who positively didn’t like our ancestors—had been an us.

And, in so doing, I stumbled into one of many main themes of Edelman’s Only for Us, an 80-minute efficiency at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre that facilities the comic’s real-life expertise, in 2017, of attending a white nationalist assembly in Queens. He calls the us-versus-them mentality in query “tribalism,” and he created the present, partly, “to discover the tribes we’re part of, what we take away from them, and what we stock with us into different rooms.” As he defined to me, he desires to know “concerning the issues we obscure in our on a regular basis lives to slot in, and what the price of that’s, and the way a lot of that’s compelled, and the way a lot of that we think about to be compelled.” 

All through the narrative of Only for Us, the factor that Edelman chooses to obscure, not less than among the many alternately sinister and pathetic group of bigots whose assembly he crashes, is his Jewishness. Whether or not he reveals himself, or whether or not he will probably be revealed, constitutes his story’s main dramatic engine. His viewers, in fact, by no means has any doubts as to his cultural background—however the comic shortly problematizes reductive beliefs about identification and scuttles the urge to establish with him too wholly. Edelman isn’t simply Jewish. He was raised Orthodox, and his relationship to faith is intimate and fraught. And he’s not simply Alex Edelman: He’s, as he relates in Only for Us, Dovid Yosef ben Elazar Reuven Alexander Halevi Edelman. In disclosing his full title onstage, Edelman gestures at a non secular and familial expertise that few within the 1,000-capacity Hudson Theatre might share (typically nearly all of his audiences are non-Jewish; even fewer intersect together with his particular expertise of religious Judaism). Edelman’s all proper with that. “It’s okay,” he instructed me as we strode towards the Met’s ethereal American Wing sculpture backyard, “to be a smidge alienating.”

The query of what we share and what we don’t—and a precise definition of the “we” in query—obsesses Edelman and animates Only for Us. The comic shares an excessive amount of and about himself onstage, flinging his physique round and spinning by means of a collection of intimate anecdotes. However he maintains intentional boundaries. Although he presents audiences the prospect to talk to him after the present (he desires, genuinely, to know what they suppose), he stated, “There are occasions when somebody will ask me a query and I’ll say, ‘I don’t need to speak about that.’ And individuals are very stunned.” He does so not out of self-preservation (Alex Edelman will, it appears, speak about just about something) however to keep away from straightforward solutions. “There’s worth,” he stated, “to being not an open e book, however a e book that’s open to sure pages. There’s worth in being considerate and thoughtful about what you disclose to audiences.”

Openness, or maybe the phantasm of openness, proves an important device in Only for Us. The character of Alex Edelman welcomes his viewers with affable, loose-limbed attraction. He’s obtained a shayne punim and a self-deprecating streak, his utterances salted with millennial deadpan. A bit about Koko the Gorilla transforms right into a joke about determined loneliness in the course of the pandemic. Throughout an prolonged interlude about his brother, an Olympic skeleton competitor, he takes purpose at his personal lanky physique. Beneath this seemingly advert hoc supply, although (he describes his efficiency fashion as “telling you a narrative at a celebration”), lies a relentless pursuit of “dime-perfect precision”—an mental rigor that has pushed Edelman to tweak the present time and again, and once more, since its debut in 2018. “Comedy is a sport of inches,” he stated, “notably in my present. So I’m very cautious concerning the small items that make it enjoyable and new and attention-grabbing.” (Element-oriented doesn’t start to explain Edelman; at one level, he laid his physique down in entrance of an Egyptian sarcophagus close to the Temple of Dendur, wanting to illustrate the minuscule measurement of his first Edinburgh Fringe stage.)

This exacting focus extends even to how Edelman strikes and garments his physique whereas performing. “I’m very clear onstage,” he defined. “Very neat, very exact in my actions. No patterns, clear strains, black denims, a shirt buttoned all the best way to the highest. Very fastidious, far more fastidious than I’m in actual life. A really fastidious man.”

He presents this buttoned-up aesthetic for a similar purpose he showcases his dorky dancing and bellows an exultant, Yiddish-inflected “Intestine Shabbes!” close to the highest of his efficiency. He desires to come back throughout onstage as a “good boy.” A very good Jewish boy, to be precise. The approachable extrovert who will discuss to anybody however is aware of when to pay attention. The type of man who can empathize with anybody, who can slot in wherever, who will even take into account serving to white nationalists curate their on-line presence if it means being favored. 

When taking purpose on the “good boy” in dialog, although, Edelman’s demeanor modified. Eager edges surfaced and his pronouncements sharpened. “The joke” of the present, he stated, “is that none of us are good boys.” Moments later, as we imbibed the serenity of the Astor Chinese language Backyard Courtroom, he put the idea of empathy beneath a equally unforgiving microscope. “The reality is that empathy ought to be a fundamental human emotion,” he argued, earlier than including, “Or perhaps it shouldn’t be an emotion in any respect, when you’re sitting with white nationalists.”

This compulsion to look at each side of a problem is, he is aware of, very Jewish. The comic embraces the concept of questions that he “can’t reply however does ask,” noting that inside Jewish custom, “asking the query is simply pretty much as good as answering it.” (In diverting his viewers’s questions, then, perhaps he’s additionally partaking them in proto-Talmudic discourse.) However don’t mistake this capaciousness for equivocation. Edelman refuses definitive statements solely once they may result in reductive pondering, mental laziness, and smugness, all of which he despises. “The present is hopefully a battle towards smug,” he stated. “The ur-narrative of the present has to do with self-satisfaction.” In spite of everything, if boy thinks that he’s boy—is he actually boy?

Edelman has spent years honing this portrayal, questioning and redirecting his personal impulses. To that finish, he solicited “grasp class notes” from comedians like Steve Martin, Jerry Seinfeld, Stephen Colbert, and Ben Stiller. Most influential of all have been Edelman’s mentor and producer, Mike Birbiglia, and his director, dramaturg, and co-deviser, Adam Brace, who died just a few months in the past on the age of 43. When the comic spoke about Brace’s sudden passing, he did so with a stark, disarming candor. “I believe performing the present will probably be extraordinarily gratifying and really painful,” he stated, “as a result of it’s this tether to him. I can not stress how shut we had been. He emphasised the perfect components of me and helped me cowl up or tackle the weakest. It’s so uncommon what occurred to this present. It’s so surpassingly fortunate. For a present this spare to go to Broadway, all the pieces must go proper, and Adam was the factor that went very proper.”

A solo present invitations a sure self-aggrandizement that’s laborious to flee. Over the previous 5 years, hundreds of viewers members have clung to Edelman’s phrases, rapt, able to snort or boo or gasp. However the performer’s continuous invocations of Birbiglia and Brace, of David Sedaris and Spalding Grey and Doug Wright, of his father and household and associates, of the Jewish individuals, work towards any impulse towards self-absorption. At the same time as he aligns himself with beforehand extant comedian and spiritual traditions, Edelman stays cautious of over-simplification. To the phrase “illustration,” he reacted with warning. “I don’t know…” he hedged, pondering a query concerning the Jewish male physique onstage. “I can solely actually converse to my physique.” Nonetheless, the performer is conscious of the neighborhood that has formed the present. Of the sections that concentrate on his household, he stated, “I would like to elucidate why I’m how I’m in a room. You want context for what it means to be me.”

Jews who love theatre—or individuals who love theatre about Jews—have loved one thing of a bonanza over the previous yr. The 2022-23 New York season has featured Tom Stoppard’s luxurious Leopoldstadt and a celebrated revival of Parade—each Tony winners, and each based mostly in depictions of historic antisemitism. Subsequent yr, Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic and Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s Concord will tackle comparable themes. Only for Us distinguishes itself from these performs with its stand-up-inspired kind, but additionally its setting. Queens in 2017 is uncomfortably shut, and Edelman’s workaday white nationalists, who wrestle with puzzles and chow down on pastries, really feel eerily regular. There’s a distinction, too, in the best way that Only for Us treats its viewers. A part of the enchantment of works like Leopoldstadt and Parade lies of their formation of an “us” that contains Jewish and non-Jewish viewers members alike, allied towards the bigotry all of us witness onstage. However Edelman questions such a union. If we’ve fashioned an us, he desires to know why and the way, and who it consists of. And he desires the aforementioned “us” to ask those self same questions of him and of ourselves.

The will to encourage crucial pondering helps clarify Edelman’s favourite type of joke, the type that he considers “technically nice” as a result of it asks the viewers to do “precisely half the work.” As a signature instance he provided, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” An Alex Edelman model of this way may seem like his admission that, upon assembly a cute white nationalist, “I assumed to myself, with no irony, ‘You by no means know.’”

This division of labor takes curation. Actually, the comic stated, “Curation is all the pieces.” As a result of, as severely as Edelman takes his personal private context and the context of his work, what issues essentially the most to him is the context introduced by every particular person viewers member. As a case examine for the way this context features, Edelman referenced a significant theme of his present, i.e., Jews and their relationship to whiteness. He defined, “Individuals with quite a lot of uncertainties on one facet or the opposite depart with a lot of doubt about that relationship, as a result of it’s a sophisticated relationship. I by no means say that it’s sophisticated, however individuals perceive based mostly on the way it’s introduced.”

In different phrases, Edelman leaves his viewers with the sensation that he will get it, whether or not that “it” is nerdiness or Jewishness or outsiderness or the will to be boy. However now and again he pulls again, reminding his viewers that it’s we, not he, who’ve crammed the area between us—and that we’ve executed so by imagining a set of shared experiences that will or might not exist. “The present isn’t about your Judaism,” he jogged my memory as we sat on a sunlit marble fountain. Actually, relating to his personal non secular beliefs, “You don’t know the half of it!”

With that warning, that expression of our variations, Edelman helped me perceive the sport on the coronary heart of Only for Us, its irresistible comedian sample. By leaving area for his viewers, the comic forces us to make assumptions about him and about ourselves. When he upends these shibboleths, although, he gestures towards a deeper, extra rigorous mode of pondering, spectating, and interacting with others. A mode of pondering that questions outward appearances and deeply held beliefs—that drives him to ask, “Are you Jewish?” even when he already is aware of the reply.

Gabrielle Hoyt is a dramaturg, author, and director. She is pursuing her MFA at Yale. @gabhoyt

Associated