A Bad Friend

Theater J presents A Bad Friend, written by Jules Feiffer. Rose is a sixteen-year-old struggling through the vicissitudes of adolescence in a family of 1950’s Communists in Brooklyn. Rose’s firebrand mother, Naomi, views Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union as bulwarks in the struggle against anti-Semitism, clinging emotionally to party fictions even as her more skeptical husband learns of the infamous Doctor’s Plot in the wake of Stalin’s Death. Naomi’s Ferocious Loyalty to Stalin, this “Bad Friend” of The Left, is but one of several instances of misplaced trust, as her ambitious Hollywood screenwriting brother follows in the dubious footsteps of Clifford Odets, and daughter Rose befriends a potential informer, endangering her family, in this moving suspenseful and surprisingly funny play about loyalty, politics, and betrayal. Directed by Nick Olcott.