Summer is comedy season on Tucson stages, but comedy isn’t
necessarily frivolous.

Well, sometimes it is, as in the entertaining Jewtopia, a
send-up of all things Jewish, courtesy of Arizona Onstage Productions.
(More information later.) But there are other kinds of comedy as well,
including the fairy romance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, reviewed in this space last week, and an unavoidably serious
comedy called Rum and Coke, presented by the UA’s Arizona
Repertory Theatre.

I say unavoidably serious, because Keith Reddin’s Rum and
Coke is about the U.S.-masterminded invasion of Cuba at the Bay of
Pigs in 1961, the first in a series of American military failures over
the past 50 years.

In Rum and Coke, Jake Seward is an idealistic young man who
becomes a low-level operative in the government’s plot to send far too
few Cuban exiles back to their homeland to overthrow that dirty bearded
Communist, Fidel Castro. Idealistic he may be, but Jake develops a
clear notion of what the Cubans he’s helping to train really
need—and it’s more than they’re getting from Jake’s CIA
superiors.

It’s always funny to watch bureaucrats bungle their jobs, but in
this case, lives are at stake, and playwright Reddin doesn’t trivialize
that. Had Bertolt Brecht written this play—unlikely, given his
Marxist faith—it would have been even darker and far more
cynical. Reddin, in contrast, shows more sympathy for all of his
characters. Fidel, in a couple of scenes, seems relatively sincere, and
so do the Cuban infiltrators, and even most of the Americans. Even the
operation’s mastermind, Thomas Tanner (played with just the right
degree of arrogance by Dwayne Palmer), is less malevolent than
overconfident. He apparently regards himself as something of a jaded
philosopher-warrior; in one of Reddin’s nice, subtle touches, he’s
named his boat the Marcus Aurelius.

Nobody’s really innocent, though. The Cubans would certainly like to
take back their country, but meanwhile, they’re not above demanding a
fresh supply of whores for their training camp. Jake’s sister, Linda,
is a quasi-crusading reporter, but she’s easily co-opted by the
American government.

Jake is played by UA sophomore Joe Hubbard as the sort of nerdy
company man who wears his black suit and narrow tie even to the beach,
but he’s also capable of developing great sympathy for the men he’s
sending into danger. The other students in this town-and-gown
production—principally Michelle Wicklas as Linda and Brad Kula as
one of Jake’s hardliner friends—are also good, with townies
Palmer, William Hubbard, Brian Wees, Richard Shipman and especially
Julio Sauceda turning in fine work in their various, sometimes
multiple, roles.

The one problem with this production, well-directed by Brent Gibbs,
is that it’s in the wrong space. Most scenes, heated as they may
become, are intimate two- or three-character conversations that seem
shrunken in the big Marroney Theatre. As a result, the student actors
in particular often focus more on projection than expression. This show
would have fared much better in the black-box Tornabene Theatre out
back.

What the big proscenium space does show off well is Sally Day’s
inventive set design, consisting of fairly simple modules that slide in
and out, with scenic elements projected on screens to the sides and
back. There’s an especially fine rainforest effect, among other
things.

As is the UA’s practice, this summer production will have a short
run this month, and then return in September as the opening attraction
of Arizona Repertory’s full season.

It looks like Arizona Onstage Productions’ latest show will also be
returning in the fall, because its scheduled run this month is selling
out, even with added performances. If you can’t see Jewtopia now, you’ll have another chance Nov. 14-15.

Why is Jewtopia so popular? Because it makes fun of Jews? It
does, but not in a way that’s anti-Semitic. The one time a character
starts repeating that old saw about secret Jewish world domination,
he’s quickly but gently slapped down. What the show, conceived by nice
Jewish boys, mocks is not Jews or the supposed Jewish “character,” but
certain Jewish-American cultural habits that are, frankly,
funny—like never ordering any item from a restaurant menu without
asking for so many changes that it’s altered beyond recognition.

Jewtopia is a play for Jews who enjoy laughing at Jewish
stereotypes, and for their knowing Gentile friends. It’s not an
especially good play, but it is very funny. Its main weakness is that
it’s like a series of separate skits that happen to include the same
two characters all the way through, with other characters dropped in as
necessary. Almost every scene seems to come from a different play. Can
a two-hour series of jokes about stereotypes really provide a dramatic
structure? And doesn’t anybody have anything new to say about Jewish
mothers?

Apparently not, but the basic joke is this: As maligned and
segregated (often self-segregated) as Jews have been through history, a
lot of Gentiles would like to be Jewish. Take one of the two main
characters, please: an Irish-American Catholic named Chris O’Connell,
who poses as a nice Jewish boy in order to obtain a Jewish wife,
whereupon he will never again have to make a decision of his own. In
terms of the religion and the Hebrew language, Chris knows a lot more
than his authentically Jewish boyhood friend, Adam Lipschitz, but he
can’t handle himself convincingly in Jewish society, so he goes to Adam
for some tutoring.

The plan: If Adam can turn Chris into a believable Jew, Chris will
help Adam wend his way through an online Jewish dating service that
Chris flippantly calls “Jewtopia.”

If anybody should be offended by this show, it’s not Jews in
general, but Jewish women, who are depicted, without exception, as
being seriously disturbed in one way or another. From the purely Jewish
angle, though, unless you spend every waking minute at meetings of the
Anti-Defamation League, you probably won’t walk out of this show in
high dudgeon.

Partly, that’s because the production, smoothly directed by Annette
Hillman, features lead actors who can be funny without descending into
stereotype themselves. The hapless Jacob M. Brown and the strutting Jay
C. Cotner do everything they can to make the characters that Bryan
Fogel and Sam Wolfson have barely sketched out for them seem like real
people. Among the several other actors taking smaller, multiple roles,
Jaimie Pruden stands out for her versatility and confidence.

Jewtopia is not by any means a great play, but it is not a
dangerous one, and it’s often a funny one, thanks to this good-natured
Arizona Onstage production.

This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2009.