GOLDA’S BALCONY
Star venerates role as leader
To many people, Tovah Feldshuh is the face of a dignified, tenaciously tough-as-nails woman leading her beleaguered people against all the odds.
But are we talking legendary Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, the subject of the onewoman show Golda’s Balcony, which Feldshuh has been playing on-and-off since 2002 and is bringing to the Segal Centre? Or are we talking Deanna Monroe, the humane ex-congresswoman who governed the safe-haven Alexandria in the zombie apocalypse series The Walking Dead?
If the comparison seems flippant, Feldshuh wholeheartedly embraces it during a phone conversation. Did she draw on her experience playing Meir for her stint on The Walking Dead?
“Absolutely,” she says, adding that Monroe was largely based on Hillary Clinton.
Feldshuh was speaking on a cellphone with crackly connection as she rushed around New York streets between two major family events: she’d just delivered a eulogy for her late parents and was now preparing for her son’s imminent wedding.
During our conversation, it sounds as though she’s breaking off to respond to an appreciative passerby: “Yeah, high five … high five … thank you very much, sir.” Perhaps he had recognized her as Meir, or Monroe, or both. Or perhaps the prototypical Jewish mom she played both in the TV show Crazy Ex- Girlfriend and the film Kissing Jessica Stein. Or it could have been for her Emmynominated roles in the 1970s miniseries Holocaust and the TV drama Law and Order.
Of all the many parts Feldshuh has played in her more than 40-year career, Golda Meir is obviously up there in her list of most momentous, largely because of the accolades it has brought her, including a Tony nomination. Mainly, though, it’s because Feldshuh so clearly venerates the woman whose complex personality she has been inhabiting for 15 years (the show is the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history).
“I believe in the principle of Tikkun Olam,” Feldshuh explains, “the idea that each human being is put on this planet for the purpose of healing the world. Golda Meir is one of my Tikkun, my badges of honour.”
Feldshuh plays Meir, she says, “with great pride as a service to the national and international Jewish community and to the free world.”
Perhaps that sounds as if the play is a hagiography; its author William Gibson has described it as an attempt to answer the question: “What happens when idealism becomes power?”
The balcony of the title, in fact, refers not just to the one outside Meir’s Tel Aviv apartment, but also to the observation platform of Israel’s secret nuclear facility in the Negev desert.
A section of the play revolves around her agonizing over whether to prevent Israel’s extinction by using nuclear weapons during the darkest days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Whatever doubts the play might harbour about some of Meir’s more hawkish policies (including unleashing an international assassination squad on the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre), there’s no doubting Feldshuh’s passionate commitment to the state of Israel.
A large part of our conversation is taken up by her fervently contextualizing Israel’s conduct throughout its 70 years of existence.
She refers to “the privilege of the threat of extinction” to explain both the tenacity of Israel to survive and the great cultural achievements of the Jewish people.
Questions of power, its uses and abuses, are obviously electrifying the atmosphere right now in Feldshuh’s U.S. homeland, and she becomes almost incandescent when addressing the political situation.
“This is what is so horrendous about the current administration — this man is not morally fit to be president. Golda was more than morally fit to be prime minister. She walked the walk.”
Feldshuh talks in admiring terms of how, in keeping with her principles as a utopian socialist, Meir refused a government residence, opting instead for a modest home, and of how she would hitch a ride to the movies because she didn’t have a car. “She was the real McCoy. She wasn’t a fibber, a faker, a liar. I can’t tell you — we’re lost. If we can’t depend on the moral rectitude of the commander in chief of what’s supposed to be the greatest democracy in the western hemisphere. …”
I ask if she’s making use of this anger to give her performance as Meir even more edge.
“Oh, you’re such a good egg for that question,” Feldshuh says, eager to explain her acting process. “What the actor tries to do is to find the trigger. It doesn’t matter what it is. That’s the private information of the actor. But it then triggers an authentic feeling so that there is no distance between the soul of the actor and the soul of the character. So when I think of Golda’s children, I think of my Brandon and my Amanda. When I think of Russia, I think of my greatgrandmother who was killed in the pogroms in Belarus in the 1880s. So yes, my concern and outrage with the current administration absolutely translates to the political areas of the piece in an authentic way.”
Last year, Feldshuh gave us her own interpretation of a U.S. president in the apocalyptic TV series Salvation.
This is what is so horrendous about the current administration — this man is not morally fit to be president. Golda was more than morally fit to be prime minister. She walked the walk.
Ever up for a challenge, she also recently played Joe Jacobs, the Jewish — and, yes, male — manager of the Nazi’s favourite boxer, Max Schmeling, in Dancing With Giants, a play written by her brother, David Feldshuh.
Meantime, there are those other family matters to attend to.
“I have to bike home, then I have to bike to the hairdresser to try on my wedding gown to see if he’s the right one to do my hair,” Feldshuh says.
“You wanna talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous?”
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
Another one-woman show opening this week is Counting Aloud from Persephone Productions. Written and performed by Persephone founder Gabrielle Soskin, it’s the personal story of a woman in her senior years taking up the piano and discovering in it a metaphor for life. It plays from May 31 to June 3 at Studio Jean-Valcourt du Conservatoire, 4750 Henri-Julien Ave. Tickets: $40, under-25s: $20. Call 514-873-4031, Local 313, or visit persephoneproductions.org