STAGE REVIEW : An Erratically Entertaining Highways Performance Work

To be young, gay and Jewish. That’s the theme of “Jew Meat,” an erratically entertaining but seldom enlightening performance piece at Highways.

The piece was promoted as “a hot, steamy journey through the nightmare of history in which three Jewish, queer men explore being twice blessed and cursed.” But history and Judaic tradition are barely mentioned: a phrase about Auschwitz, one line about Jacob wrestling with a boy, a quick blast at the Torah’s admonitions against homosexuality.

Instead, “Jew Meat” is about these particular “Jewish, queer men”: John Ellis, Douglas Sadownick and Matt Silverstein. A mercifully brief section in which they pose as old geezers with faux Yiddish accents is followed by a stream of one-liners about their memories of growing up gay and Jewish. In the funniest, most accomplished extended scene, they play their mothers, chatting about their sons, their husbands, their lives.

Later, as each man performs his own monologue, the material strays from the Jewish angle, until the last solo--by Ellis--is simply a jaunty dance number about being horny.

But this comes only after the requisite nude scene. Silverstein appears as a kind of Greek god, in a royal robe. The others undress him, then gasp upon realizing that he is Jewish, at which point Sadownick assumes the dominant role in their continued sex play, complete with snarled anti-Semitic epithets (while Ellis simply leaves the stage).

It’s not a pretty picture, but then what do you expect from a show with such a raw title? The bitterness is overcome during the finale, a ritualistic dance that delivers an upbeat note of brotherly solidarity.