
Josh Radnor, Madeline Weinstein, Cherise Boothe, and Michael Khalid Karadsheh in The Ally. Photo: Joan Marcus
“I was cowed by what at least appeared to be the stark, unwavering certainty of everybody else weighing in on these issues. What possible use was the mess inside of me in the face of that?” writes Itamar Moses in the playwright’s note in the program for The Ally. To start with the elephant in the room—like the Broadway transfer of A Prayer for the French Republic, The Ally lands in a very different geopolitical moment from the play’s September 2023 setting—and from the seven or eight years Itamar Moses has been working on the play and even than when the Public planned its season. It’s hard to sit in the Anspacher Theater in February 2024 and hear the assertion that “only a few hundred people a year” have died in conflict between Israel and Palestine. And one could equally say, “What possible use is a play about arguing in the face of this?” Which, in some ways, is the point the play will ultimately get around to—that political debate is one thing, but the actual on the ground stakes of whose life is presently, imminently at risk, are something different. That the experience of, as a Palestinian college student says, “moving through the world as the threat of violence incarnate” can’t be weighed in the balance against “moral credibility.” That the play’s various passionate certainties may be its applause lines, but applause, too, isn’t necessarily useful.
The stakes and viewpoints in The Ally are, for the most part, mapped onto the characters’ identities, in a way that makes its array of opinions feel more diagrammatic than nuanced–probably necessary to keep the players straight, but nonetheless a little overdetermined, a little too consciously evenhanded. Asaf (Josh Radnor), a Jewish American playwright of Israeli parentage, teaches part time at the university where Gwen (Joy Osmanski), his Korean American wife, has been hired to preside over an expansion of the school farther into the surrounding Black community—a project that was handled poorly the last time they did it. (The university is never named, but it could be Yale, University of Chicago, U Penn…any elite institution nested uneasily into a semi-segregated city.) By coincidence, Asaf’s serious college ex, Nakia (Cherise Boothe), who is Black, is an organizer and activist in this city, where she grew up. The relationship didn’t end well and Asaf has been consciously not getting in touch with her—until a promising Black student, Baron (Elijah Jones), also a local, comes to ask Asaf to sign on to a social justice manifesto drafted by Nakia in the wake of a local incident of racially motivated police violence that took the life of Baron’s cousin. (In a telling detail about Asaf that becomes a refrain, he’s dimly aware of the death, but hasn’t watched the video and has no idea his student is connected.)
What he thinks will be a simple signature in support of a student he likes (and maybe a way to gain a few points with Nakia) gets more complicated when he reads the manifesto. Because in addition to the calls for economic and racial justice in the U.S., the document has one section condemning Israel. And it’s not that Asaf disagrees with the criticism, but something he can’t quite articulate sticks in his craw.
The chain of events that follows depicts him, often not very much to his credit–and to Moses’s, for as much as Asaf is not a stand-in for the playwright, the biographical similarities are no secret–as a man looking for an ideological place to hang his hat, ready to hear and be swayed by (and yet to pick holes in, because that’s how he sees the world) every argument that comes his way. (Radnor does an excellent job of keeping us focused on each argument before us; his Asaf is endearing in how sincere he is every time, and frustrating in his inability to sit still and examine his own convictions.) He’s primed to respond when two other undergraduate students–the Jewish American Rachel (Madeline Weinstein) and the Palestinian Farad (Michael Khalid Karadsheh) ask him to be the faculty sponsor for their new group, and primed to be swayed to their point of view. Until that position puts him in the crosshairs of a Jewish PhD student (Ben Rosenfield), appalled that Asaf, as a Jew and an Israeli, is willing to support a speaker the new group wants to invite. And so on and so forth; big chunks of the play are barnburning, passionate monologues: Reuben’s in defense of Israel; Farad’s in defense of the Palestinian people; Baron’s in defense of his own safety. They’re all undeniably effective; they’re all delivered with such controlled vehemence by Rosenfield, Karadsheh, and Jones that the audience can barely breathe; they all prompt spontaneous applause from the audience.
But I find myself wondering, why is it these three single-minded, uninterrupted and uninterruptable, lava flows of polemic that hold all the energy in the room, and why don’t the women in the play get that kind of soapbox of principle? Which is not to say they don’t get plenty of time to speak–but both Nakia’s and Gwen’s chances to state their cause come not with the kind of authority of standing in their own experience that’s granted to Baron, Reuben, Farad, but in personal opposition and interaction with Asaf. Nakia is rehashing their relationship as much as stating her position; Gwen is protecting her career and trying to be a supportive wife as much as getting a chance to talk about her perspective. (Rachel does, to an extent, get a moment, but it certainly doesn’t get the weight of any of the other students.) Nakia, in particular, is the play’s most effective activist–where’s her soapbox? Charitably, one could argue that Moses is showing us women who act with nuance rather than polemic, that Gwen, Rachel, and Nakia are the ones who actually do things here–help the university recover from its mistakes; start a new bridge-building organization; plan a protest–but in a play about the clash of certainties, it feels like a missed opportunity that the men get to be so very much more certain.
Director Lila Neugebauer, no stranger to intricately woven ensemble work, here stages with the lightest of touches, letting the actors hold forth and hold center in turn. Three chairs comprise the majority of Lael Jellinek’s set, complemented by an end table and an ornately carved door upstage that gets used only once, by a (Black woman) rabbi at the end of the piece (also played by Boothe). Scene shifts are done simply with the actors’ entrances and exits, usually with a measured beat of overlap. And despite the grandstanding nature of the play’s showiest moments, there’s a lot of subtle acting work going on here too; you’ll miss a lot if you don’t look away from the speaker at any given moment to clock the reactions. With Rachel, the earnest middle class Jewish radical, and Baron, the clear-sighted Black “townie” who is “in but not of” the university, Neugebauer may lean a little too hard into the vocal and physical mannerisms that signify “Gen Z girl” and “urban Black youth,” but Moses has given them enough room that we see the characters through the mannerisms, and Weinstein and Jones bring the nuance and the conviction to make them work. Reuven—who appears, delivers his monologue, and then is never seen again—and Farid—a mostly silent presence until his turn in the spotlight—are less well drawn as characters, but come alive when they need to.
Moses sets us up to believe, for a long time, that Asaf’s tragic flaw is the inability not to see all sides of a question—from the very opening lines, where his wife wants him to decide where to spend the holidays. But as we see him pick up the arguments used by his previous interlocutor, we also see self-interest creeping through. He signs the manifesto in part because he hears Nakia’s name attached to it; he agrees to sponsor Rachel’s group because he wants to be the “young, smart, cool, Jewish professor” she calls him.
And when, in the end, Asaf is asked to actually engage with the bodily realities of the world around him, to reckon with the possibility of actually being hurt–he stands by, and stands alone. Is it self-interest? Is it principle? Is it fear? It’s not Moses’s job to take sides for us, to give us certainty or push us in a direction, of course, I wonder whether the play at which we cheer for all the best-expressed opinions doesn’t recapitulate the problem it’s trying to engage with. Who decides whose viewpoint wins? The one that gets the loudest applause? And how do we in the audience feel now, almost six months in to a war in Gaza that’s killed 25,000+ Palestinians after beginning with a terrorist act that killed 1,200 Israelis? For Nakia, Asaf says, “the ideas and the lived experience became one.” He may be starting to feel that now–but what is he doing with it? What are we?
Gwen tells her husband, “It is certainly preferable to do things for the right reasons. Not just the right thing but with the exact right fucking impetus behind it, what a joyful way to go through life, except I literally don’t know anyone who gets to do it. I definitely don’t know anybody who expects it.” Asaf, perhaps, is learning not to expect it. But the real question is once we take moral certainty off the table–now what do we do? And when do we start applauding for the Gwens, the Nakias, even the Rachels, who always understood that action needed to be part of the equation?