At the Unicorn, the charged connections of Bad Jews

A death in the family can be messy. There’s the grief and the mourning, yes, but underneath lurks a desire — guilty or masked, perhaps — for the possessions left behind. For some, acquiring a thing owned by the dead fills a void left in the wake of loss. For the three cousins in Bad Jews, at the Unicorn Theatre, the article in question is a necklace, linking them to a beloved grandfather and cherished memories of him.

Joshua Harmon’s play debuted in 2012 in the Black Box space at New York City’s Roundabout Theatre, moved the next year to that venue’s main stage, and is set for several regional productions. The reasons for its success are clear: smart and insightful dialogue, a pace that doesn’t let up, and a grip that doesn’t let go. Under the skillful hand of director Cynthia Levin, Bad Jews is the Unicorn’s second hit this season. It may not be the rousing musical of the year’s opening production, Hands on a Hardbody, but it has all the choreography of a dance — one animated by the angst, rage, love and longing of the flawed yet sympathetic characters.

What transpires in this 80-minute one-act feels familiar, like something summoned from the collective unconscious. We recognize the people here, gathered just days after their grandfather’s funeral. Brothers Jonah (Mark Thomas) and Liam (Doogin Brown) — as different as the laid-back undergrad and the intense doctoral candidate that they respectively are — wear their family’s wealth like old broken-in jeans. Their first cousin, Daphna (Dina Thomas), regards them with some envy yet doesn’t really want for things. She attends Vassar and may be on her way to settling in Israel within the year. A thinker and a talker — and can she talk — she’s the more traditional Jew in this family, and central to this biting, gut-wrenchingly funny and very moving play.

They come together in a claustrophobic Upper West Side studio apartment (set design by Gary Mosby), and they’ve all been affected differently by their grandfather’s death. While Daphna and Jonah await the arrival of Liam and Melody (Erika Baker), Liam’s somewhat clueless non-Jewish girlfriend, the stage is set for a clash as they stake claims on a family heirloom. Though some memories are shared, recollections aren’t facts, and are subject to disparate interpretations. Who’s to say whether the gold chai (meaning life) that their grandfather wore around his neck means more to one than another?

Dina Thomas is outstanding as a woman who can’t not talk, the kind of person who takes a conversation to its conclusion, then pushes on past. Her timing and delivery are impeccable, and we empathize and cringe, almost simultaneously. Brown returns to the Unicorn — he gave a fine performance in 2013 in the Unicorn’s My Name Is Asher Lev — in top form as the intense, entitled, assimilated grad student who didn’t make it to the funeral. Liam values the Japanese culture of his studies over the Jewish heritage of his birth, and he works himself into rages here, in takeoffs that don’t need long runways. They erupt from a deeply held loathing for Daphna — or something else.

As his girlfriend, Melody, Baker personifies everything that Daphna isn’t (and wouldn’t want to be). She plays an unwitting catalyst in the ruckus to ensue, though it takes little to incite Daphna and Liam.

Mark Thomas’ Jonah is caught amid the others like a middle child lost between more attention-getting siblings — the bond with his older brother versus consideration for his cousin’s concerns. The necklace, after all, is about the legacy left by the grandfather they’ve lost. And Thomas is perfect as the guy who tries to remain uninvolved, who’s left to mourn internally, without the firm taking of sides.

It’s not a pretty struggle, and it raises profound questions about the relevance of memory and culture. What makes a good Jew or a bad Jew? “Culture matters,” Daphna insists.

If the characters represent identifiable types, Harmon’s play is so well-written — and Levin’s direction so on point as she guides actors working far beneath the surface — that this play exists well beyond such concern. It was often funny enough to make me cry, but my tears at the end welled from the power of its surprising denouement.