Fringe Festival: Peace Warriors

Twisted. A twisted plot and twisted characters. Vile characters. Yale gender studies professor Darryl Lewis (Marisa Mickel) has been cheating on her husband, a less than successful academic, since before their 17 year old daughter Gwen (Natalia Emanuel) was born. Darryl's not so secret lover, Geoffrey Warshawski (Graham Stevens) is a renowned professor and longtime friend of the Lewises that shares her ultra leftist politics and arrives for the evening as a houseguest. But, as her cuckolded husband sleeps in their bedroom above, she doesn’t get any action from her libertine. That’s because G.W. is tired out from boning a fellow houseguest. So they fight instead. Then he beds the daughter. Who may actually be his. Did we mention this is a play about peace in the Middle East?

The extreme anti-Israel liberalism of the characters is central to the plot of Peace Warriors. Playwright Doron Ben-Atar’s sophisticated yet accessible dialogue and witty rhetoric pits G.W. and Darryl against Scooter Lewis (Mark Sanders), a former activist on the mend. On the left, the play’s Jewish extremists view the apartheid, rogue state of Israel as a crisis akin to McCarthyism and wouldn’t be caught dead watching establishment propaganda like Schindler’s List. And while it’s not like he’s become a Republican or anything, Mr. Lewis has moved a little to the right from his grad school days. He’s no longer a rabid anti-Zionist zealot and doesn’t read the New York Review of Books, which rather upsets the Mrs. As is the production’s intent, this conflict raises interesting questions of potential self-serving agendas of fighting for a cause, human frailty, and the meaning of being a warrior for peace.