Sit down, John!

Sometimes we need a break — even a short one — from the insanity and ugliness of the world around us. I got one last Sunday night at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn.

You know how exciting it can be to discover that you share obsessions with your family? At our seder, many of us learned that we love the musical “1776,” and I was able to tell them, from PR we got from this very newspaper, that it was playing at the Paper Mill. And so 11 of us braved the you’ve-gotta-be-kiddingness of the parking chaos there to see it together. (And we learned, to our delight, that there were enough of us to qualify for a group discount. Who knew?)

Is there anything Jewish about “1776”? Both of its creators — Sherman Edwards, who wrote the music and the lyrics, and whose brainchild it was, and Peter Stone, who wrote the book — were Jewish, and Mr. Edwards grew up in Weequahic, so he couldn’t have been more local. (There are more than a few loving Jersey jokes in the script.)

That doesn’t make it Jewish, of course. None of the characters were Jewish, nor were the real members of the Continental Congress upon whom they were based. And not everything has to be Jewish!

But there is something about it, about the way that it is based on argument, constant argument, the unwillingness to let an idea drop unexamined, or even half-examined, that seems deeply familiar.

And the thing about “1776” is how rich the ideas that are being argued are, and how prescient it all seems. It opened on Broadway in 1969; of course, that was a greatly divided, violent time, with people on either side of the political divide loathing each other. Sort of like now.

The ideas in the play — how a federal system can be constructed out of individual colonies, how much individual personalities affect statecraft, how much individual risk any one person can take on in pursuit of a communal goal, how private lives and communal needs can be balanced, how deeply the rot of slavery infected the country from its very creation, and when compromise is good and healthy and when it is not — still reverberate today.

And the situation at its heart — Congress as an impossibly divided body, incapable of anything other than “Piddle, Twiddle, and Resolve,” as its hero, John Adams — despite being “obnoxious and disliked, it cannot be denied” — tells us, is frighteningly familiar. It’s what Congress is like right now.

“1776” is funny at times, charming most of the time, more talky than most musicals but still full of clever, character-revealing music. (And the actors at the Paper Mill all had wonderful voices and marvelously clear enunciation, which matters in this kind of musical.) But it turns on a dramatic, horrifying, genuinely thought-provoking song about slavery.

The Northerners who are in favor of independence want to abolish slavery. The Southerners, who care less about independence than about the continuation of their vile peculiar institution, refuse to sign a document banning it. “Molasses to Rum,” sung by Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, is a searing denunciation of the so-called “triangle trade,” molasses to rum to slaves. Its accusation is that while the South brutalized and dehumanized people as they forced them into slavery, Northerners conducted the trade that brought them from Africa to auction. Their hands and their souls are just as dirty, the song insists.

It’s not a typical Broadway tune. But it forces us to think about compromise. Slavery was monstrously evil. Was allowing it to continue a fair price for independence for the nascent American experiment? And who was paying that price? Certainly not the delegates.

And to go back to prescience — Pennsylvania was a swing state in 1776, just as it is now, 250 years later. What is going on there?

So by going to “1776,” my family was able to enjoy each other’s company, listen to clever, engaging songs, and go home thinking.

Sounds Jewish to me!

—JP