Arts
Continued from Page 27
So, it’s a Jewish family that under-
stands that it’s Jewish but that also
never practices religion. Th at’s a relat-
able premise in 2022/5783.

Yet as soon as the play starts, you
quickly realize that this is not a
story about real Jews who are trying
to reconnect with their religion. It’s
a story about Jewish and millennial
caricatures who barely have a Jewish
identity. Th ere’s the old white dad Saul, whose
opinions are outdated but who still says
a little too much; there’s the therapist
mom Linda, who cannot stop criticiz-
ing her daughters’ life choices; there’s
the older daughter Sammi, who lives
across the country in California and
runs an alternative school that gives no
grades; and there’s the younger daugh-
ter Ariel, who wants to move to Bali
and become a yoga instructor.

Th e father looks back fondly on
seders at his nana’s house. But the
mother was a communist who did not
believe in religion, so the family never
practiced. Rose Kaplan makes this
much clear. What she doesn’t make
clear is how this family even maintains
a Jewish identity.

Saul has his childhood experiences,
to be sure. Linda, on the other hand,
has no formative Jewish memories to
speak of, and her daughters, thanks to
her, do not have any either.

Th e family has never sat for a seder
before; they’ve never stepped foot
inside of a synagogue; they’ve never
celebrated a bar or bat mitzvah; they do
not even reference the type of extended
Jewish community that even the most
secular Jews oft en fi nd themselves in.

Being Jewish is little more than some
faint and distant footnote from their
family tree. When would it have even
occurred to them? Yet somehow, with-
out any shared experiences, they all
seem to possess a deep understanding
of their Jewish identity.

Th is is a family of intellectuals. I can
see why their Jewish history might be
more extreme than that of the aver-
age family. But their Jewish history is
pretty much nonexistent, making the
entire premise seem unrealistic.

Th ese are hardly the play’s only fl aws,
either. It is 90 minutes, but it could be
40. It has three extra characters who
use way too much stage time to carry
out their respective shticks.

Th ere’s Saul’s sister Nan, an old com-
munist and comrade of Linda’s whose
only note is to ask why in the world is
this family sitting for Passover. Th ere’s
Ester, Linda’s assistant who keeps beg-
ging her to take a call from Ellen
DeGeneres about Linda’s popular new
book. And there’s Beverly, a conser-
vative former neighbor of the family
who is as stupid as you would expect a
conservative character in a play about
communists to be.

If you’re going to write a play about
caricatures, you better at least make
them funny. Maybe they spend much
of the show making you laugh before
revealing some surprising depth as the
story goes on. Th is is oft en what makes
for a good comedy.

“We All Fall Down” is not even sup-
posed to be a comedy, but that’s proba-
bly the best it could have done. JE
jsaff ren@midatlanticmedia.com
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