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New York Times
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘Becoming Eve' Offers Testaments Old and New
A few minutes into 'Becoming Eve,' an inventive, sympathetic Off Broadway play produced by New York Theater Workshop at Abrons Arts Center, Chava (Tommy Dorfman), a college student, executes an abrupt costume change. Though she bursts onto the set, the makeshift sanctuary of a synagogue on the Upper West Side, in a cropped pink sweatshirt and flowered minidress, she soon runs into a side room and emerges in loose jeans and a drab, body-camouflaging hoodie. From her original look, only a pair of pink sneakers remain. Even this outfit (Enver Chakartash designed the costumes) is daring in its way. Chava was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. So if these jeans are comparatively modest, they remain far more modern than the clothes that Chava grew up in, which were men's clothes. Chava is trans, and she has arrived at this sanctuary to come out to her father, Tati (Richard Schiff), an ultraorthodox rabbi. 'Becoming Eve,' written by Emil Weinstein and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is based on Abby Chava Stein's memoir of the same name. In her 20s, Stein left her community and her religion, then she came out as trans. (Stein has since returned to Judaism, and is a rabbi at a progressive congregation in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.) Though mostly set within that sanctuary (designed by Arnulfo Maldonado, with dramatic lighting by Ben Stanton), the play also includes flashbacks of Chava as a child and adolescent and as a young husband. In these sections, Chava is played by a series of puppets (expertly designed by Amanda Villalobos and deployed by two puppeteers). Dorfman, standing nearby, voices these scenes. Because Chava knows that her father lives untouched by the modern world (with heavy restrictions on the internet and most media) and that he is allergic to sentiment, Chava has found biblical commentary that seems to argue her case. To help her, she has enlisted Jonah (Brandon Uranowitz), the chatty, empathetic rabbi of this progressive synagogue. The play allows for heady scriptural dialogue, which speaks to Weinstein and Rafaeli's faith in the audience's intelligence. (One reasonable concession: These Yiddish conversations are rendered in English.) But the show is perhaps too intellectual and careful. Weinstein and Rafaeli, in a laudable effort to be fair to all, exercise perhaps too light a touch. (Regarding the women in Chava's life, Judy Kuhn as her mother, Mami, and Tedra Millan as Fraidy, her wife, that touch is feather light; they are given little to do.) There are no villains here, no victims, which seems right and yet it results in a reticence that extends to Dorfman's performance. That reticence may reflect a particular moment in Chava's transition, her comfort at this point in her own body. Or perhaps Stein herself is really this subdued. Mostly it implies an unusual degree of caution and sensitivity on the part of the production team. But it means that Chava never appears as faceted as Uranowitz's anxious, charismatic Jonah or Schiff's Tati, a particular mix of emotionalism and restraint. Only late in the play, when Dorfman allows a rare flash of anger, does a more complicated Chava emerge. Still, these weaknesses are relatively minor. And why kvetch? In a moment when the current administration is seeking to deny the lived experience of roughly 1.6 million transgender Americans, a play with the compassion of 'Becoming Eve' is a welcome tonic, served in a Kiddush cup. It is perhaps not a surprise or a spoiler to say that Tati cannot fully accept Chava as Chava (the real Stein remains estranged from most of her family). But in arguing for the full and essential humanity of all the characters, 'Becoming Eve' demands our humanity in return. That's a mitzvah.
New York Times
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
From Hasidic Brooklyn to Off Broadway: The Life of a Trans Rabbi
One morning in 2015, a few years after she had begun to separate herself from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world in which she was raised, Abby Stein met with her father to come out as a woman. Raised in a Hasidic enclave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Stein was all but certain that her family was unfamiliar with the notion of being transgender. In their isolated community, gender roles were rigid, and the internet was blocked entirely or made 'kosher' with software that restricted sites like Wikipedia. 'Any modern gender theory wouldn't speak to him,' Stein, 33, said of approaching her father. 'I needed to find something that would work.' That high-stakes conversation is at the center of a new Off Broadway play, 'Becoming Eve,' opening next week. In the lightly fictionalized play, the protagonist is called Chava, which is Stein's middle name. She is portrayed by Tommy Dorfman, opposite Richard Schiff, the 'West Wing' star who, playing her father, is transformed by the traditional garb of a Hasidic man, complete with a long beard and a black silken coat. The play ends shortly before the real events that turned Stein into a public figure. The same day that she had the conversation with her father, Stein, who was ordained as a Hasidic rabbi in 2011, came out to the larger world in a blog post. She woke up the next morning to find that the post on her typically lightly read blog had around 20,000 views. Soon, there were news headlines about her transition: 'Member of prominent U.S. Hasidic family comes out as transgender,' one read. 'Before I knew it, it was everywhere,' Stein said. In 2019, Stein published a memoir about her upbringing and transition. It became the source material for the play, which is being produced by New York Theater Workshop and staged at Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan. That tense meeting at the center of 'Becoming Eve' is interspersed with scenes from Stein's past before her transition: desperate prayers, at 6 years old, to be turned into a girl; rebelliousness, at 14, against the strictures of religious schooling; a growing discomfort with life inside the community, at 20, after an arranged marriage and the birth of a son. To translate Stein's memoir to the stage, the production had to find a way to represent Chava at all of those ages. After two workshops, the playwright, Emil Weinstein, and the director, Tyne Rafaeli, decided to try a different approach: puppets. Weinstein's mother, Jessica Litwak, who specializes in experimental theater, had performed with puppets throughout his childhood. The format seemed both practical — there was no need to hire a group of child actors — and metaphorical, signifying Stein's experience of dislocation between her body and her true self. Brought alive by two masked operators, the puppets interact with the actors, sitting on Schiff's lap or taking a cookie from Judy Kuhn, who plays Chava's mother. Dorfman, positioned on the edge of the action, delivers the dialogue. 'It transports you to the past while also portraying this visual metaphor of trans-ness and feeling disembodied,' said Weinstein, whom Stein supported as the choice for the playwright in part because he is both trans and Jewish. (Stein officiated Weinstein's wedding last fall.) The emotional center of the play, however, involves three flesh-and-blood actors, who meet for a fraught conversation at the progressive Upper West Side synagogue where Chava gravitated after leaving Hasidism. The expectations on Stein were loftier than for most. Both of her parents descended from rabbinical dynasties, including, on her father's side, the founder of the Hasidic movement, known as the Baal Shem Tov. The progressive synagogue's rabbi, played by Brandon Uranowitz, joins Chava in trying to explain her gender identity to her father in a language he might understand: Hasidic rabbinical commentary. They direct him to an interpretation of a biblical story by an 18th-century rabbi — an ancestor of Stein's. Citing an earlier mystical text, the rabbi wrote that, at times, the soul of a female has ended up in a male body. 'The soul and the body can be in mismatch,' Chava explains to her father in the play. (Though the play is performed in English, the actual conversations generally took place in Yiddish, the language that Stein's family speaks at home.) Stein said one of her goals for the play is to present a transgender story that embraces aspects of religion rather than rejecting it entirely. After gradually leaving the Hasidic community starting in 2012, Stein repudiated Judaism, before reclaiming the parts of it that she found meaningful. She is now a rabbi at a progressive synagogue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. She remains largely alienated from her family, though, including most of her 12 siblings. Before rehearsals for the play started, Stein took Dorfman, fresh off her Broadway debut in 'Romeo + Juliet,' on a tour of her old neighborhood. They visited a grocery store and a bakery, saw the wedding venue where her family members have been married and stood across the street from Stein's family home. 'It made clear the stakes,' Dorfman said. Last fall, the production hit a major speed bump. New York Theater Workshop was planning to stage the play at the Connelly Theater in the East Village, but the building's landlord — the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York — rejected the show. The Archdiocese had begun more intensely scrutinizing the content of shows proposed for the venue, saying in a statement from October that 'nothing should take place on church-owned property that is contrary to the teaching of the church.' The producers scrambled to find a new theater. Rafaeli said she was bent on keeping the play on schedule, motivated by the Archdiocese's rejection, as well as the increasingly charged political climate surrounding transgender identity. That climate, Rafaeli said, made the play feel all the more urgent. But would the small Lower East Side theater, which draws audiences that skew socially progressive, attract anyone whose mind is undecided? 'That's the biggest challenge of our culture,' Rafaeli said. In portraying that consequential conversation between Stein and her father, Rafaeli wanted to make sure Stein's father was not portrayed as a villain, but as someone whose impulses the audience could understand, too. That part took more imagination: The production had complete access to Stein, but none to her father, who does not speak to his daughter. 'My deepest commitment to this play,' Rafaeli said, 'has been that we equally empathize with each one of them and understand why the bridge is so hard to build from both sides.'
New York Times
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Practicing for When the Bombs Fall in ‘A Knock on the Roof'
There comes a point late in 'A Knock on the Roof,' a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that's taking shape in her dreams? Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israeli Defense Forces attacked it. 'You see,' she tells us in narrator mode, 'two wars ago, they started using a technique called 'a knock on the roof.' It's a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.' So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it's safer but just to be with them. Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, 'A Knock on the Roof' long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023. The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage. Part of the show's tonal challenge comes from trying to balance comic absurdity with undeniable darkness. Part stems from the banality of ordinary life, still to a great extent unremarkable even when wrenched and mangled by war. The destruction that looms and threatens is as yet, for Mariam and her family, at bay. To the audience, Mariam is friendly and relatable, addressing us directly, nudging us to imagine ourselves in her shoes. How many pairs of underwear would we pack if we had to flee? How far can we run in five minutes? (A voice from the crowd at the performance I saw: 'I can't run at all.') Even as Mariam's anxiety escalates, she maintains her facade. 'I act normal,' she says. This is a motif. But the play, which seems to waver between fleshing Mariam out and letting her remain an Everywoman, doesn't allow us to know her very well. An eventual cluster of details about her relationship with her husband, who is abroad studying for a master's degree, feels inorganic. For the most part, Ibraheem keeps the play's focus tight on Mariam, her mother and sweet, mischievous Nour; when it opens wider to take in the city around them, it gains a welcome heft. Butler, returning to the theater where he had such great success with 'What the Constitution Means to Me,' tries to encourage a connection between actor and spectators by seating some of the crowd onstage and leaving the lights up on the audience for a good chunk of the show. Both elements feel like obstacles to our immersion in Mariam's life. (The minimal set is by Frank J Oliva, lighting by Oona Curley.) 'A Knock on the Roof' wants to draw us close and deepen our understanding. I'm not sure it succeeds at that. But we do leave knowing that Mariam, whether awake or asleep, has been trapped inside a nightmare all along.
