The Ally

[dorchadas]

Yesterday, worldbshiny took me to see the premier of The Ally at Theatre Wit. Originally I looked up the playwrite (Itamar Moses), looked up the main character's name (Asaf), and thought "Oh, I see why she invited me." and then I asked her about it and it turned out I was completely wrong--she invited me because I had invited her to go get pancakes at Hanabusa and she hadn't been able to make it due to being on a Disney cruise. Oops.

The blurb for the play is:

When Asaf's student asks him to sign a manifesto condemning police brutality, he wants to help — until he realizes the petition says more than he's ready to stand behind. As the debate roars through his Midwestern campus and his ex-girlfriend takes the lead, Asaf is pulled into a political storm that tests his convictions and his sense of self. Will his fumbling entrée into activism help or hurt the cause?

...and really despite the framing, most of the play is about Asaf. He's the only character in every scene, he has a bunch of monologues about how he feels about things, and the way he feels is mostly "conflicted." Asaf has the classic affliction of the nice liberal, which is that he just wants to be on the right side and not really get involved in internal conflicts, and for most of his life he was able to do that. Even during his earlier activist days, he and his activist friends all agreed on their anti-racist, anti-surveillance state, anti-war objectives (his activist days were just during and before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq) and he never actually had to take a stand on something controversial. And when he does, it turns out you can't please everyone.

The play tries to cover basically all ground, sometimes to its detriment. If you've ever heard anyone use any argument about Israel and Palestine--right of return, Israeli territorial ambitions, Hamas rocket attacks, Mizraḥi voting patterns, land for peace, pinkwashing, the Damgana, the Nakba, whatever--it's in here, and mostly in a big argument scene in the second act where a bunch of characters get to make dramatic speeches opposing each other. Well, mostly opposing each other. Asaf is fond of saying he mostly agrees with other people, except for one small thing, and maybe we can talk about it and work it all out, you know?

Maybe. Not everything can be so easily worked out. There was what seemed like an intentional contrast between Asaf's interactions with his (non-Jewish) wife Gwen, who works as a community outreach manager at the college where he teaches, where they always start assuming the best intentions of each other and are willing to listen and hear each other's points of view, and his interactions with the other characters in the play which are characterized by a lot of misunderstanding (at best). There's a part near the end where Asaf confronts Nakia, his activist ex-girlfriend, and asks her to put in a section about antisemitism in her twenty-page manifesto that has room for police brutality, capitalist disinvestment, American imperialism, Israel, and French actions in Mali. Just a sentence, anything. And she says no.

After seeing the play I went and looked up some information about it because I had questions about the choices made, and it led to me to this article in the Forward about it which answered a lot of my questions already:

...how do I understand what new lens this will cause audiences to bring to it. A lot of the "rewrite" after Oct. 7, was me rereading through the eyes of "now." It was clear that the play has to take place pre-Oct. 7 because if it took place now it would be a completely different play, so then it was a question of how we experience it now. On a practical level, if someone says something that has been proven definitively wrong, is that intentional irony or foreshadowing on my part or does that seem like a mistake?

It was definitely the latter for me, though less so now that I know the play's context. Especially during the big argument scene, I was thinking that some of these people would probably not even be in the same room nowadays, much less be willing to talk to each other. That said, the part about tribalism--looking at the bad acts of our side and saying "Oh, those are just bad actors but we are basically good" and looking at the bad acts of the other side and saying "Those are expressions of your most fundamental beliefs, you monsters"--is true both now and forever, and the message that we function as the default enemy for Christian and Islamic societies (so, the majority of the developed world even now) delivered by a Jewish Ph.D student to Asaf is basically the main thesis of the excellent book Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition. And I'm sure we can all relate to the guy who just wants everyone to get along.

The staging depicted above was static through the whole play, though for act two they moved the tables around. Location changes were depicted through lighting shifts, which worked for me but didn't work for worldbshiny. I thought the ending was fantastic, Asaf sitting in a synagogue and engaging in התבודדות (hitbodedut, "solitude") as he tries to work out his conflicting imperatives, and I looked it up and found that this was the second-to-last scene in the original. There was a scene where Asaf goes to the march organized by Nakia and his wife is angry with him for being late to it, but Moses mentioned how they rewrote the scene several times and eventually just cut it because at that point, all the important parts of the play were done.

It runs through May 3rd.