Before his audition for The Ally, a new play by Itamar Moses, the actor Michael Khalid Karadsheh printed out the monologue that his character, Farid, a Palestinian student at an American university, would give in the second act.

The speech cites both the Mideast conflicts specific history and Farids personal testimony of, he says, the experience of moving through the world as the threat of violence incarnate. Karadsheh who booked the part was bowled over.

I dont think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way, said Karadsheh, whose parents are from Jordan and who has ancestors who were from Birzeit in the West Bank.

Farids speech sits alongside others, though, in Mosess play: one delivered by an observant Jew branding much criticism of Israel as antisemitic; another by a Black lawyer connecting Israels policies toward Palestinians to police brutality in the United States; another by a Korean American bemoaning the mainstreams overlooking of East Asians. These speeches are invariably answered by rebuttals, which are answered by their own counter-rebuttals, all by characters who feel they have skin in the game.

In other words, The Ally, which opens Tuesday at the Public Theater in a production directed by Lila Neugebauer and starring Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother), is a not abstract and none too brief chronicle of our times, a minestrone of hot-button issues: Israelis and Palestinians, racism and antisemitism, free speech and campus politics, housing and gentrification, the excesses of progressivism even the tenuous employment of adjunct professors.

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The Ally, a Play About Israel and Free Speech, Tackles Big Issues - The New York Times