Eighteen years of history, tested against a story they were handed at twenty-two.
A single trip to Israel in the summer of 2006 is the seed from which Jonathan Spector's new play grows — and by the time it's done, nearly two decades of American Jewish identity, fractured friendship, and the slow erosion of inherited narratives have passed through it. That play, Birthright, is coming to MCC Theater off Broadway this June, and the company has now announced the full cast that will carry it.
Spector is the playwright behind Eureka Day, which earned him a Tony Award and established him as one of the more incisive voices working in American theater today — a writer drawn to communities under pressure, to the moment when shared belief starts to splinter. Birthright looks like a natural extension of that preoccupation.
The story follows six young friends who reunite after returning from a Birthright trip — the program that has sent hundreds of thousands of young Jewish Americans to Israel on subsidized tours since the late 1990s. That reunion, set in 2006, is only the beginning. The play then tracks the group across eighteen years, watching how a single formative experience reverberates differently through each of them as the world changes around them and the stories they were raised on begin to strain against reality.
The ensemble assembled to tell that story is, by any measure, a serious one. Abbi Jacobson, best known for co-creating and starring in Broad City, plays Izzy. Zoë Winters, who spent years as one of the more quietly devastating presences in Succession, takes on the role of Chaya. Tony Award nominee Eli Gelb, who drew considerable attention for his work in Stereophonic, plays Noah. Liz Larsen, also a Tony nominee for Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, plays Deborah. Rounding out the cast are Hale Appleman of The Magicians as Lev, Molly Bernard of Younger as Alona, and Nate Mann, known for Masters of the Air, as Emerson.
The production is directed by Teddy Bergman, with a design team that brings considerable weight of its own. Scott Pask handles the set, Clint Ramos the costumes, Natasha Katz the lighting, and Lee Kinney the sound. Projection design comes from David Bengali, with additional contributions from a full complement of specialists covering wigs, hair, makeup, intimacy coordination, voice coaching, and props.
Birthright runs from June 5 through July 12 at MCC Theater, with opening night set for June 24. It is a limited engagement. Ticket information has not yet been released, but given the cast and the subject matter — a play about Jewish American identity written in the long shadow of October 7 and everything that has followed — it is likely to draw significant attention well before the curtain goes up.
What Spector does with eighteen years of history, and with a group of characters whose bonds were forged on a trip explicitly designed to shape how they see themselves and their place in the world, will be worth watching closely.
Notable Quotes
The play follows six young friends as they respond to a changing world and whether reality fits the narratives they've all grown up with.— MCC Theater production description
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does the Birthright trip specifically make such fertile ground for a play about identity?
Because it's a program built around a thesis — that young Jewish Americans will feel something transformative if they stand on that land. It plants a narrative. What happens when life spends eighteen years testing it is the whole question.
Is Spector writing into a political moment, or is this more of a long-gestating personal project?
Probably both, and the tension between those two things is part of what makes it interesting. The play was conceived before the world looked the way it does now, but it arrives into a very different conversation.
The cast is unusually television-heavy for an off-Broadway production. Does that change what the play is?
It changes who comes to see it, certainly. But actors like Winters and Jacobson have serious stage chops. The question is whether the familiarity of their faces helps or complicates the work of disappearing into these characters.
Eighteen years is a long span for a single play. How does that kind of structure usually function?
It lets the audience watch people become who they are. You see the gap between who they were at twenty-two and who they are at forty, and the play lives in that gap.
Spector's Eureka Day was about vaccine hesitancy in a progressive school community. Is there a throughline to this?
Absolutely. He keeps returning to communities that share values — or think they do — and then stress-testing them. The Birthright group is another version of that: people who were handed the same story and then had to decide what to do with it.
What should audiences be watching for when they go?
Whether the play lets its characters be genuinely divided, rather than sorting them into right and wrong answers. That's the harder thing to do, and it's what Spector does best.