Ben
Brantley

July 6, 2015

Lifetime movies and Philip Roth don’t usually pop up in the same frame of reference. Yet it’s hard to avoid thinking of both those sudsy topical television films and the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” as you watch “Legacy,” Daniel Goldfarb’s uneasy comedy of morals at the Williamstown Theater Festival here. You might even, if you were in a whimsical mood, perceive this play as a sort of custom-made fantasy purgatory whipped up for Mr. Roth, a just dessert of womanly woes served to a writer who has sometimes been accused of misogyny. Not that Mr. Goldfarb, a dramatist who specializes in anatomies of Jewish identity (“Modern Orthodox,” “Adam Baum and the Jew Movie”), probably had any such objective in mind. Though the tone of his latest offering is often flippant, its concerns are anything but frivolous. Mr. Goldfarb has said he conceived this work as a contemporary reimagining of the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac, in which the limits of a father’s faith are tested by a child-sacrifice-demanding God. That aspect of the play doesn’t become fully apparent until the second act, in a genuinely harrowing scene centered around a life-taking medical procedure.