Just For Us review: Alex Edelman's one-man show humorously probes the limits of political debate
Ever since Donald Trump shocked the nation by winning the 2016 presidential election, Americans have wondered how to make sense of our "polarizing" politics. There certainly seems to be a significant impasse between voters seeking to protect the rights of marginalized people and those seeking to limit those freedoms. Nevertheless, various writers and prominent media publications have spent years arguing that if Americans could simply talk to each other with honest and open debate, these seemingly-insurmountable divisions could be bridged.
Well, comedian Alex Edelman tried just that by sitting down with people who hate him, and his new one-man show, Just For Us (opening on Broadway this week at the Hudson Theatre for a limited run through Aug. 19), is a hilarious chronicle of the results.
Just For Us, which Edelman has been performing and honing for several years now, begins with the comedian recounting the saga of Robin Williams and Koko, the gorilla who could speak in American Sign Language (ASL). They met in 2001 and got along great, to the point that when Koko was informed of Williams' death in 2014, she signaled that she was genuinely sad. If Williams' comedy could, in Edelman's words, "cross the species barrier," then why shouldn't he try to connect with new kinds of people?
So after getting entangled in a Twitter argument with antisemites, Edelman decided to add them to a Twitter list — both so that he could laugh at their noxious opinions, and because, well, "let them be on a list for once!" From that list, he learned that there was going to be an in-person meeting of white nationalists in Queens, and decided to attend incognito.
The core of Just For Us is Edelman unwinding this central story of what happened at that meeting, interspersed with frequent tangents about his life and upbringing in a religiously observant Jewish family from Boston. Though similar to a stand-up comedy routine, Just For Us' focus on this meeting gives it a theatrical aura worthy of the Hudson Theatre (especially when Edelman assembles stools on stage to mimic the semicircle formation he remembers), and there's a lot of physicality with the performer running back and forth. He's an energetic, self-deprecating raconteur whose stories are also quite thought-provoking.
Although Edelman jokes that his comedy won't make sense to anybody not raised on the Upper West Side, he provides plenty of context and explanatory footnotes for Gentiles in the audience. He also tells a story about the one year he and his family celebrated Christmas, despite his father's reluctance, in order to help a Christian friend who had nowhere else to go for the holidays. This Christmas story is funny and cringe-worthy, but also taught Edelman an important lesson about his faith. Empathy, he notes, is one of the most important values in Judaism, but honoring that concept won't always seem conventionally Jewish.
That's part of what led him to that fateful meeting at a Queens apartment. But though it's nice to imagine that interpersonal kindness and connection can overcome old hatreds — as Edelman does in an amusing running bit where he imagines a rom-com style happy ending for himself and a cute girl who was also in attendance — it's also important to acknowledge reality and the divisions that some people don't want to let go of.
Antisemitism is very much on Broadway's mind of late. The first week of Just For Us performances will overlap with the final Broadway performances of Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard's epic play about a multi-generational Jewish family's experience of the Holocaust and all that led up to it, and Parade is only a few blocks away. Edelman's show is much more light-hearted than those productions — especially since, as he makes a point of noting, the miserable white nationalists he met are far removed from the historical Nazis — but the context is hard to miss.
Empathy, alas, can only go so far. But there are other ways to frustrate the people who hate you, as Just For Us demonstrates with plenty of laughs — particularly in Edelman's brilliant final joke that we won't spoil here. Grade: B+
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