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In The Ally, Impossible Conversations We’re All Having
Itamar Moses’s drama about a lefty Israeli American caught up in the complexity of pro-Palestine academia is confident and eloquent in its humility.
Asaf Sternheim (Josh Radnor) is a playwright who, according to his wife, Gwen (Joy Osmanski), “teaches one day a week, one semester a year.” His parents are Israeli immigrants, he grew up in Berkeley, and his plays tend to be anchored, he admits sheepishly, on the great whites of Enlightenment Europe. For a swift two hours and 40 minutes, the play’s seven characters — dressed in simple street clothes, pacing around an almost empty space — drive headlong into the kinds of discussions that, depending on your personality, either make you want to roll up your sleeves and start belching flames into the comments thread or to hurl your computer out the window and join a Buddhist monastery. That’s because what Moses and director Lila Neugebauer (elegantly staging hard conversationseverywhere these days) understand is that outside the spare, neutrally carpeted, vaguely Ivy League container of Lael Jellinek’s set — and outside this theater — people are dying, bombs are exploding, and the ability to argue over the rightness and wrongness of it all from the relatively safe remove of colleges and playhouses is at once an absurd privilege and a moral imperative.
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