Alex Edelman won an Emmy for writing “Just for Us.”
The only problem? “There was never any script of the show,” he admits.
“It was always in my head, and it would change every night.”
The show – which also won a special Tony – chronicles his visit to a white supremacists’ meeting. Because he’s white, Edelman figured attendees wouldn’t know he was Jewish, and he would be able to see what prompted their hatred of various minorities. Performed more than 500 times over the course of seven years, the show morphed repeatedly until it got to television. There, veteran director Alex Timbers helped him shape the show for a home audience.
"Just for Us" began as a fringe festival routine, then expanded to an off-Broadway show and, now, a TV special.
“We went for what we thought would play best visually, which meant cutting some jokes,” Edelman says. Close-ups, longshots and other blocking ideas helped give the piece its flow. “We invested a lot of time, thought, energy into how this would look on camera because I didn’t want it to be just a show where it was a capture. I wanted it to be its own special thing.”
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Adam Brace, who helped Edelman launch “Just for Us,” died just as it was about to open on Broadway. That proved unsettling but Timbers’ grasp of the material helped him edit it even more.
Timbers, he says, “is truly unbelievable. Whenever anyone asked a question or offered a criticism that I couldn’t immediately answer, I’d go, ‘OK, so the show is somehow assailable,” and the show should not be assailable. The show should be a complete watertight explanation of my point of view.” Timbers helped him seal the cracks.
Once “Just for Us” opened on Broadway a host of comedians and performers came to see it. “The night that Seinfeld came was really unbelievable,” he says. But when Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams (and a big part of the piece), came it was important. “Zelda Williams is a really good friend of mine, but she doesn’t like standup that much. I asked her once why she didn’t and she said, ‘When you’re raised by Mozart, you don’t need to go see a lounge pianist.’”
Still airing on HBO/Max, “Just for Us” has brought new eyes to its star.
Comedian Alex Edelman in “Just for Us."
Next, he’ll star in a reboot of “The Office,” set at a struggling newspaper.
Because of the special, Edelman gets requests to weigh in on Gaza, the Middle East, Judaism, white supremacy and other issues crucial to his show.
“October 7th, when it all sort of started in Gaza, I wondered if I should even be doing the show. A couple of people sent me some pretty unsavory messages and I called my producer, Jenny Gersten, and I said, ‘Should I do the show?’ She was like, ‘Let me think about it,’ and then she called me the next day and she’s like, ‘You have to do the show. It’ll be like a nice escape.’”
Before that performance, Edelman went to the back of the theater and saw everybody watching the war on their phones. “And I was like, you know what? For an hour and a half, people don’t have to watch a war. ‘Should it be evergreen and the moment refracts through it? Or should it be a direct conversation?’”
Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” which commented on the pandemic, faced a similar situation, he says. “As an artist, you always have to weigh that. If you make a piece of work, how do you balance timelessness with timeliness? Thank god it feels like ‘Just for Us’ has been able to do both.”
