TV star shines on stage as former Israeli PM Golda Meir
Golda’s Balcony
(out of 4) By William Gibson, production consultant and original Broadway director, Scott Schwartz. Until Sunday at the Greenwin Theatre, Toronto Centre for the Arts, 5040 Yonge St. hgjewishtheatre.com or 1-855-985-2787 If you look up “trouper” in the dictionary you’d likely find a photo of the American actor Tovah Feldshuh. Currently enjoying high public profile thanks to featured roles in TV’s The Walking Dead and Crazy ExGirlfriend, and the Broadway hit musical Pippin, Feldshuh’s stage career spans more than four decades and includes multiple Tony Award nominations, and Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards.
She’s been performing this solo play about the former prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, on and off for more than 13 years; it holds the record for the longest-running onewoman show in Broadway history and has come to Toronto for the first time presented by the Harold Green Jewish Theatre.
It’s a superb vehicle for Feldshuh’s talents and she undertakes it with full commitment. Looking remarkably like Meir in her senior years — thanks to a helmet-like wig, effective makeup, padded costume and stooped physicality — Feldshuh commands the audience’s attention throughout the show’s 90 minutes. The heavy amplification of her voice takes some getting used to and initially seems unnecessary in the 296seat Greenwin Theatre but is perhaps a required support given the demands of the role.
William Gibson (best known for his play The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller) first wrote an unsuccessful multi-character play based on interviews with Meir and then reshaped the material into this solo piece.
It begins with Meir sitting at a table, chain-smoking and recalling her past; soon, she takes off a dog-eared bathrobe to reveal her iconic wool suit and sensible shoes, and launches into vivid storytelling. Projected images (by Batwin + Robin Productions) of some of the figures mentioned, including Moshe Dayan, Da- vid Ben-Gurion and Meir’s husband, Morris Meyerson, help keep the dense storytelling clear.
The play’s title in fact refers to two balconies, the first in Meir’s Tel Aviv home, which faced onto the Mediterranean Sea and which Gibson associates with her role as the mother of the Israeli state, opening up her arms to Jews around the world. The other balcony was an observation platform in the Negev Desert from which Meir oversaw the development of a nuclear arsenal which, the play recounts, she threatened to deploy in the 1973 Yom Kippur War unless the U.S. supplied the underprepared Israeli forces with fighter jets and other support.
The play explores the connections and sometimes conflicts between these two sides of Meir’s experience and beliefs: the passionate Zionist, motivated by her family’s early expe- rience as near-victims of Russian pogroms, who became the hard-driving politician, presiding over armed conflict in the name of defending the homeland she helped establish. “What happens when idealism becomes power?” she asks acutely, late in the play, which depicts her as haunted by the knowledge that thousands of soldiers are dying in the name of Israel — but also underlines her belief until the end in the Jewish right to a state in that territory.
While complex, this is by its nature a one-sided account that doesn’t give much time to Palestinian claims nor venture into the last 40 years of conflict in the Middle East. Ideally it will spur spectators to look back at this historical period and this compelling figure and try to learn more.
Certainly, the challenges it presents Meir as facing — the acute tension between political convictions and personal commitments, her status as often the lone woman in her professional milieu — continue to resonate. And as a vehicle for Feldshuh’s talents and (as a brief post-show address to the audience makes clear) convictions, it’s second to none.