If there's a single theme coursing through Golda's Balcony, it's the distance between the ideal and the real.
"I dreamed of Paradise," Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir tells us of her original concept of her country, and then she shows us what she found instead: war, troubled alliances, political obstructions, a broken marriage. Pacing up and down on the Florida Studio Theatre stage, Meir — as played by Kate Alexander — reminds us that we all live in Eden's exurbs, where choosing a life devoted to one's country may mean losing one's husband, and where wily Henry Kissinger can't be trusted to promptly provide replacement aircraft even when the fate of a U.S. friend depends on it.
But Meir never loses her sense of true north, and even if events never quite let her move in that direction, she scores a few triumphs and more or less minimizes her losses. She's even able to wish us "shalom" at play's end — though there's an unmistakable uncertainty in her voice. Reality has been hard on her, harder still because she dared to dream. She's old now and tired, and all too used to disillusion.
The play, by William Gibson (best known for The Miracle Worker), uses a framing device: Within minutes of the opening curtain, Meir gets a call announcing that the Egyptians and Syrians are attacking, and that what will come to be known as the Yom Kippur War has begun. As Meir responds to the crisis, she remembers: her early days in Russia; her adolescence in Milwaukee; her decision to make aliyah to Palestine with her husband, Morris; the first years of the State of Israel and then the series of events that eventually led to her becoming prime minister.
Again and again, the ideal/real dichotomy figures prominently. For example, in the war itself: "Half my cabinet, generals, and not one of them could smell yesterday that today it's war?" President Nixon is supposed to be a staunch friend of Israel, but when ambassador Simcha Dinitz asks for planes and replacement parts, the president and Kissinger dither and temporize. Yes, finally the U.S. comes through, and the Israelis triumph; but it's only after Meir uses the sort of geopolitical blackmail that should never have been necessary.
"Tell me, my hypothetical friend," she says to God as the crisis plays out, "in the grain of this earth you put in good and evil like two ends of a single stick, so nobody picks up one without the other. Why?" In the Paradise she imagines, good is possible without its opposite. A few months after the war ends, she resigns as prime minister.
The play — and the ideal/real dichotomy — isn't only historical. As she reminisces between crises, Meir tells us about Morris Myerson, the young man she met in Denver. The match seems made in heaven, at least in its earliest days. Morris is a sign-painter and lover of music and literature who doesn't share Meir's fervent Zionism but who ends up traveling with her to Palestine nonetheless. They live on a kibbutz — Meir subscribes to Ben-Gurion's assertion that "the Jewish homeland must be a model for the redemption of the human race" — but Morris is unhappy there, and finally they move to a two-room apartment in Jerusalem. There Meir has children, but her drive to be involved in the political life of the country finally compels her to leave her husband and become a party secretary in Tel Aviv.
She assures us that she wasn't celibate during those years but loved "exciting and powerful men, dedicated to the cause." She also tells us that she never solved the problem of guilt — for abandoning her children when she was absorbed in Zionist work, for abandoning Zionism when she was focusing on her children. One day, Morris, visiting, reads Don Quixote to the children, and Meir interprets it as an attack. "I said, 'What's wrong with ideals?' — which were my life — and Morris said, 'What's wrong with the actual world?' I said, 'Everything! I want them to grow up in a world that's safe for Jews.' Morris said, 'I want them to grow up with a mother.'" Once again, reality is more complicated than she would have it.
Actress Alexander does her best to personalize Meir's memories with voice and gesture. Still, her performance isn't quite convincing. We're always reminded that she's acting — that she's Kate Alexander pretending to be Golda Meir, imposing one personality on the other. (The accent is a problem, too — a strange combination of East European and American.) I've seen this fine actress shine as Maria Callas in Master Class and as the wife in Albee's The Goat, but on this occasion I'm conscious of her artifice, her technique. On Nayna Ramey's attractive set, backed with geometrical shapes on which photographs and paintings are occasionally projected, Alexander never really seems to lose herself in her role. This may be an acting tour de force, but it's not a persuasive one.
Still, there are many reasons to enjoy Golda's Balcony, not the least of which is its meditation on that stubborn dichotomy I've mentioned. And there's another message, too: about a woman who never let her gender get in her way, and who acted on the world stage decisively and, often, successfully. In other words, Golda's Balcony is also a feminist play, whether or not author Gibson intended it as such. Parents trying to convince their daughters that there's no limit to their promise might want them to see it. And anyone interested in real history — which is not, fortunately, always so far from the ideal — will enjoy a visit with this unique and formidable woman.
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2007.