Theater Review—

The Performance Of A Lifetime

By Julie Stern

NEW MILFORD — If you go to New Milford’s TheatreWorks for the current production of William Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony, not only will you get to see Sonnie Osborne give the performance of her life in the role of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, but you will get an incisive history lesson as well, that can offer some insight into what some people today consider Israeli intransigence and militancy.

With black and white photographs flashing on the walls, and set in October 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, this 90-minute one woman tour de force presents the “grandmotherly” 75-year-old, pacing up and down and chain-smoking as she alternately fields phone calls from her generals, and digresses into reminiscences of her long life, beginning with her earliest memory of her carpenter father boarding up the windows in Kiev to protect the family from a murderous pogrom, to her rebellious girlhood in Wisconsin, where she became passionately involved in the Zionist labor movement, and her marriage to a gentle intellectual, Morris Myerson, who followed along reluctantly with her idealistic move to Palestine in 1921.

At the same time Meirs reflects on the personal costs of a political struggle, and the conundrum of how to reconcile moral aspirations with the realities of power.

Born in 1948, the modern State of Israel had a Declaration of  Independence which Meir (one of two women among the 24 signers) saw as comparable to the American Declaration, which she had studied in history class as a schoolgirl in Milwaukee, but its own history was more troubled and complicated.

Ever since they had been driven into exile by the Romans, some 2,000 years ago, the Jews had lived as the diaspora — minorities in every place they settled, by turns exploited, vilified and persecuted by the dominant culture.  In the 19th Century, concerned by increasing anti-Semitism and especially the pogroms of eastern Europe, Jewish philanthropists began raising money to buy land in Palestine, which at that time, having been conquered by the Turks, was part of the Ottoman Empire, which included North Africa and the Middle East.

Fast-forward to the cold war climate that succeeded World War II, when the Soviets were already providing arms and materiel to the Arabs in the hope of gaining influence. Meir, whose dream had been to create a peaceful utopian community, made her bones as an Israeli by traveling across America, speaking tirelessly (in her Wisconsin ascent) to Jewish groups, begging for the money to buy tanks and munitions, in order to keep the Jewish homeland alive. She would have preferred to be making chicken soup and darning socks for soldiers, but instead was providing them with the means to kill. And her success on this mission enabled them to win the war that led to the official establishment of the State of Israel.

Now a generation later, as the leader of her people, she is forced into a desperate chess game, involving using the threat of nuclear weapons, in order to convince the cold war powers of the US and the USSR to broker a peace deal and reign in the Syrian and Egyptian forces and their Soviet missiles.

The title of the play refers to two balconies — one that overlooks the benign and peaceful sea from her Tel Aviv apartment; the other, in the secret nuclear installation where Israeli scientists were developing the bomb, echoing the conflict between ideals and realpolitik that marked her role in history.

It is this character Golda, whom playwright Gibson (who brought Helen Keller to the stage in his prize winning drama The Miracle Worker) turns into a flesh and blood human being. Sonnie Osborne brings her to vibrant life, capturing not just the physical persona (down to the sensible shoes and the frazzled bun) but the indomitable, wise, sardonic, passionate woman thrust into a tangle of events she had never imagined.

The production is enhanced not only by Jane Farnol’s brilliant direction (which only confirms my long held opinion that she is the most gifted director in the region) but also by the combined efforts of Richard Pettibone, Scott Wyshynski and Tom Libonate, in using light, sound and an abstract but beautifully toned set that conveys the feel of desert sand and stone. The overall result is powerful, moving,  and thought provoking.

(Performances continue weekends at TheaterWorks New Milford until June 30.

See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for performance details. Visit NewtownBee.com and click on the Features tab to find an expanded version of this review.)