Comedian Alex Edelman on his one-man show ‘Just for Us,’ his strategy for dealing with bigots, and how Mike Birbiglia encouraged him to think more “expansively” about the project.
took it in. The one-man show is about many things, but it centers on one night in 2017 when Edelman decided to attend a gathering of white nationalists in Queens after seeing a tweet inviting people who wanted to learn more about their whiteness.
When I ask if audience members inquire if he had a death wish attending this meeting, he turns the question back to me. “I say to people who are like you, like, Esther, you’d go to that meeting,” he said. I shake my head. My name is Esther Zuckerman, after all. Even through Zoom, Edelman seems surprised by my reluctance, “You wouldn’t?”
As we explore this, Edelman does admit he thought the contents of the discussion on that fateful evening would have been a little different. “If I’m being honest I thought it was going to be a little more of a salon,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a little more of an exchange of ideas and then I got there and I was like, Well, it’s the exchange of one idea, handed back and forth.”
Edelman didn’t initially think his visit to the racist’s apartment where the meeting was held would turn into the basis for an entire show. It was a “three- to four-minute joke” before his collaborator and director Adam Brace suggested that it should be the spine. It continued to evolve after producer—one of the kings of the theatrical comedy monologue—encouraged him to think more “expansively” about the project. And now Edelman has made it to Broadway, the pinnacle of theatrical achievement.
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