All’s unfair in love and identity politics in Echo Theater Company’s ‘One Jewish Boy’

Before “One Jewish Boy,” a play by Stephen Laughton, even had its premiere in London in 2018, the playwright and the play were besieged by antisemitic trolling and threats. Jesse, the play’s Jewish character who is the victim of a hate crime, would not be at all surprised.

“One Jewish Boy,” which is making its West Coast debut in an Echo Theater Company production at Atwater Village Theatre, wrestles with the burden of antisemitism in the relationship between a young Jewish man and a mixed-race woman. The play begins at a marital crisis point in 2020 and unwinds all the way back to the couple’s first meeting in Ibiza in 2004.

Progressive Londoners Jesse (Zeke Goodman) and Alex (Sharae Foxie) love Bjork, getting high and calling out each other’s blind spots. They’re pretty sure they’re cool and enlightened enough to handle their cultural differences. But intimacy has a way of drawing out latent political tensions and making them intensely personal.

Directed by the Echo‘s artistic director, Chris Fields, “One Jewish Boy” tightly focuses on the conversational push and pull between Jesse and Alex as they try to work through their points of conflict. The debate between them is handled with admirable complexity, but the characters don’t have enough room to develop beyond the central argument of the play.

Jesse, understandably, has become more defensive about antisemitism since he was brutally attacked by thugs who singled him out for being Jewish. This violent event flashes onstage in the manner of a traumatic memory, with Goodman’s Jesse writhing on Justin Huen’s impressionistic urban set as lighting and sound designer Matt Richter underscores the hallucinatory nature of the assault with strobe effects. It’s one of the few breaks in the play’s running stream of strained lovers’ chat.

Sensing antisemitism on the left as well as on the right, Jesse resents being called upon to justify Israeli foreign policy. Why should he, a “diaspora Jew” from a proud line of “left-wing Jews,” have to account for the living conditions of Palestinians when he is not a “blatant Zionist” and is vehemently opposed to the Israeli government’s policies? Alex tends to think he’s overreacting, but with antisemitism rising all over the world, no one can convince Jesse that he’s being paranoid.

While sympathetic to Jesse’s post-traumatic recovery, Alex worries that he’s letting this one incident define his life. She also feels stifled by the way he uses his Jewish identity as a trump card. She’s opposed, for example, to having their son circumcised. But Jesse, while pretending to be open to a discussion, signals that this is a non-negotiable issue.

Jesse is particularly incensed by the antisemitic trope that sees Jews as “powerful, dominating and privileged” and therefore not worthy of the protections of other marginalized groups. Alex might be more sensitive to a critique aimed in her direction if Jesse weren’t so quick to overlook the oppression she experiences on a daily basis as a woman of color.

Laughton effectively embodies and personalizes the deeply felt dialectic between Alex and Jesse. If Alex has a bit more credibility, not being as intractable in her positions, both have a tendency to come off as disagreeable in their incessant bickering and self-righteousness.

But characters in drama don’t have to be likable. They do, however, have to be convincing. And here is where “One Jewish Boy” lost me. There’s something forced in the scenic snapshots of the couple laughing, dancing and romancing. The actors themselves seem perpetually on a first date — and not just with each other but also with their characters.

The drama struggles to find momentum. Part of this is a result of the play’s tricky chronology. Part of this is the sluggishly incremental nature of Laughton’s writing that filters everything through seesaw dialogue. And part of this is a production that fails to infuse the action with the necessary theatrical fire.

The conflict at the heart of “One Jewish Boy” is vast, but the modest scale of the direction seems measured for TV viewing.