newjerseynewsroom.com

Tracee Chimo plays a manipulative Vassar student in a smart new comedy

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

OFF BROADWAY REVIEW

Newcomer playwright Joshua Harmon’s “Bad Jews” offers a sharply funny character study of two young cousins wrangling over an heirloom.

Premiering last week in a 62-seat theater in the Roundabout Underground series at the Steinberg Center, “Bad Jews” is a real winner that hopefully some folks still can grab for a bargain $20 ticket.

It is likely that this smart, entertaining play will be seen at other stages in the future but the finger-tip intimacy of the Roundabout space here adds much immediacy to the event.

Viewers will feel like flies on the invisible fourth wall as they observe the increasingly argumentative doings in a snazzy but cramped studio apartment on the Upper West Side where three college-age Jewish cousins are uncomfortably lodged on the night of their grandfather’s funeral.

Liam (Michael Zegen) even missed the funeral because he was snowboarding out in Aspen with his nice shiksa girlfriend Melody (Molly Ranson). Both Liam’s absence and Melody’s presence incenses his cousin Daphna (Tracee Chimo), a quarrelsome Vassar girl who considers herself the religious one of the family.

Liam’s mild-mannered younger brother Jonah (Philip Ettinger) and Melody vainly try to stay out of the way as Liam and Daphna dispute with increasing bitterness over possession of their grandfather’s treasured chai, which he managed to hang on to through years of Holocaust horrors.

The disagreeable but lively Daphna is a multi-level character – aggressive, manipulative and secretly sad – and Tracee Chimo deeply embodies every complexity. Bristling with a frizzy mane, Chimo brings a cat-like watchfulness to the fast-talking Daphna, who enjoys pouncing on unsuspecting others, like Melody, who surprisingly turns out to be no pushover.