A pretty Golda?
Tovah almost makes it work

by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Staff Writer

In my mother’s childhood autograph book, circa 1930, there’s a rhyme that goes “Little dabs of lipstick, little drops of paint, make our pretty Mona exactly what she ain’t.” Well, that — plus lots of stuffing and probably some latex — make Tovah Feldshuh what she ain’t — Golda Meir, who around that same time, was helping to prepare the groundwork for the nascent State of Israel.

The makeup job that transforms the petite and pretty award-winning actress into the formidable doyenne of Israeli politics for her role in Golda’s Balcony is very impressive. It’s so good, in fact, that for much of the show one forgets it’s there — the ultimate achievement for theatrical effects. If the same could be said of the play’s structure, this would be a great production.

Many would say it is great. Its sold-out 17-week Off-Broadway run — which followed a triumphant start at Shakespeare and Co. in the Berkshires in the summer of 2002 — and the ardent enthusiasm of audiences at its Broadway venue, the Helen Hayes Theater, testify to its emotional power.

This is an inside view of Meir, and you come away with a more intimate understanding of the heart-wrenching realities of her leadership than any news accounts could provide. It also presents a window into some lesser known aspects of both her life — like her sexual liaisons with fellow politicians — and the power plays that surrounded her — like the nuclear “blackmail” that persuaded the United States to send additional supplies to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Viewing it in these times, with Israel again dogged by tragedy and tension, the impact of the turmoil of what it is to live in and lead Israel is all the greater.

The brief span of the 1973 Yom Kippur War is the immediate time frame for the play, and that is both its strength and its weakness. The device allows Feldshuh to portray what might have been Meir’s most agonizing experience as a leader, interposed with flashbacks to her youth in Milwaukee, her marriage, and her career trajectory. But the swings back to the present, announced with ear-splitting war sounds and flashing light effects, have a clunky, self-conscious theatricality.

Tovah Feldshuh, whose first starring NY stage role was in Yentl in 1975, strives mightily to sustain the Golda persona through all those swings. With no more than minor clothing changes — a dressing gown taken off, a jacket put on — she evokes the feisty teenager who runs away from home and falls in love with quiet intellectual, Morris Meyerson; the tormented wife and mother who can’t exist without her political involvement; and the cancer-ridden, aching but still passionate old woman dragged back to the helm in her country’s darkest hour.

The problem — at least, for this audience member — is the unrelenting pace of that dense progression. Though Feldshuh brings tremendous energy to her performance, you can sense her strain. It’s tiring to absorb all the information involved; conveying it must be infinitely more exhausting.

Idealism and power
The award-winning playwright, William Gibson (The Miracle Worker, Two for the Seesaw), was asked to write a play about Golda Meir 20 years ago. In an author’s note about the work, he writes that he jumped at the chance to meet “human beings who wield state power.” He went to Israel for four months and met Golda herself, but he couldn’t find the certain something in himself that he needed to write a satisfying work. Two years ago, he came upon his old manuscript and this time he had “the other half” — the question: “What happens when idealism becomes power?”

His solution is ingenious but not crafty enough to conceal itself. Instead, it smacks of the precocious machinations of a student playwright. His “hook” is the balcony referred to in the title — one of two. The first is outside Golda’s Tel Aviv residence, a restorative, well-earned luxury after all her years of struggle. The second and more crucial is the vantage point overlooking Israel’s underground nuclear development facility in Dimona. All through the play she refers with ominous melancholy to Dimona and the horror it contains.

No doubt the awful potential created in Dimona tortured Meir. It was a dimension of her power she probably never foresaw. That all the Zionist idealism that had fired her engines for so long should come to this ultimately monstrous menace is profoundly ironic. But nothing in the character’s monologue lays out the supposed moral dilemma. There is no personal vanity or deceit or ulterior motive here; as the playwright presents it, this is as much about Jewish survival as any other chapter in the state’s existence, and Golda’s behavior is utterly noble. If there was an element of corruption — a territorial greed or megalomaniacal delusion in Israel’s actions or in hers personally — it isn’t mentioned here.

That said, it is still fascinating to witness the dynamics of the decisions being made in the fateful hours of the war. She talks of Gen. Moshe Dayan, “a very busy…lover,” and of King Abdullah of Jordan, to whom David Ben-Gurion sent her — disguised as an Arab — a few days before Israel declared its independence, to persuade the monarch not to attack Israel. She recalls her repeated middle-of-the-night phone calls to Simcha Dinitz, Israel’s representative in Washington, demanding that he reach Henry Kissinger to impress upon the then secretary of state the urgency of Israel’s desperate need for help in the dire opening days of the Yom Kippur War.

Feldshuh has told interviewers that she strove to depict Meir’s friends and foes with equal fairness. The issue for her, she said, as it was for Golda, is our desperate desire for peace — so that teenagers aren’t sent to their deaths to defend us. The activist actress has been awarded the Israel Peace Medal for her efforts to promote peace.

The ending of the production could be emblazoned on a greeting card — a flaming sunrise with the drained but triumphant leader proclaiming her deepest wish — “Shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom!” One might quibble about the sentimentality — but not about the sentiment.