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“Golda’s Balcony” is a Riveting Political Thriller About Israel

A stunning Tovah Feldshuh moves from youthful activist
to savvy foreign minister

By Lucy Komisar

This is a spellbinding political thriller. The noise of war, machine guns and fighter planes, reverberate through the theater, and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir hunched over a plain wood table with her cigarettes, in a Milwaukee accent, her voice races back to the 1973 Yom Kippur war to reveal details that have never before been reported.

The play flashes through Golda's career from youth to retirement, a personal life – marriage to an American, Morris Meyerson -- that took second-place to her public one. She has qualms about her inattention to him, but never regrets that she put her commitment to Israel first.

The play is based on hours of interviews author Gibson had with her over eight months in 1977, the year before her death, and on evidence he found in documents. Tovah Feldshuh is stunning as the American-born Israeli, Golda Meir, who from a passionate devotee of Israel became a staunch political fighter and finally a tough foreign minister guiding her country through the shoals of a near-disastrous enemy invasion.

Feldshuh is the only character in the play, but she mimics the accents of the other known figures such as Israeli President David Ben-Gurion to recreate the dialogue. Through the play, slide projections show backdrop scenes that follow her from the U.S. to Israel – as a wife and a politician -- to Moscow where she was Israel’s first ambassador and then to the kitchen table where, called back from retirement, she confronts the chilling threat to Israel’s existence. You get the sense of reliving history.

The dramatic center is built around the Israelis' secret construction of a nuclear weapon and Golda's threat to use it during the Yom Kippur War. It is an historical coincidence that as the show is running, Mordechai Vanunu, a former nuclear technician who revealed Israel's nuclear capacity to the London Sunday Times in 1986, was released in April 2004 after 18 years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement.

At the time of the 1973 Arab war threat, U.S. President Nixon had promised the Israelis 48 Phantom warplanes and arms. But after the Arab invasion, the U.S. balked: Henry Kissinger wanted Israel to give back the lands it had seized in the 1967 war.

With the war going disastrously for Israel, Golda confers by phone with her cabinet. She has Israeli ambassador to Washington Simcha Dinitz wake Kissinger and tell him that nuclear bombs are targeting the military headquarters of Egypt and Syria. Golda can now order the launching of "the temple weapon."

Temple weapon? It's a reference to the destruction of the past Temples in Jerusalem and the pledge that Israelis would not let it happen again. After the failed British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956, (an attempt to prevent Egyptian President Nasser from nationalizing the Suez Canal), the French agreed to help the Israelis build a nuclear reactor. Hundreds of feet underground in the Negev desert at Dimona, the Israelis processed uranium to get plutonium for nuclear warheads.

Golda wonders, if Israel dropped the bomb on Arab capitals, would the Soviets then bomb Tel Aviv? Would the U.S. bomb Moscow? And Moscow, New York? These lines are spoken almost as throw-aways.

The U.S. agrees to re-supply Israel. When London and Paris won't let the planes land, they refuel in the air. Later, Kissinger would tell Golda, "You blackmailed us."

This is a fascinating saga and a mesmerizing piece of theater.

Golda's Balcony." Written by William Gibson. Directed by Scott Schwartz. Starring Tovah Feldshuh.

The Manhattan Ensemble Theater at the Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W. 44th Street, Tue-Fri at 8pm; Sat at 5pm, 8:30pm; Wed & Sun at 3pm. Running time 1:30. $46.25-$76.25. http://www.met.com.

Images by Aaron Epstein.

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