Friday, October 01, 2004

Mark Steyn on Golda's Balcony

From The New Criterion:

"If you can't be a Zionist on Broadway, where can you be? That surely is one lesson to be drawn from Golda's Balcony, which has been playing at the Helen Hayes for almost a year now. That's a remarkable run for a solo show on a serious subject not exactly in tune with prevailing fashion, so I felt I ought to see it before it turned into Cats or The Mousetrap. The play is a new work by William Gibson, one of the old lions of the Anne Frank era: he made his name in the Fifties with Two for the Seesaw and The Miracle Worker. In his later career, he's found himself circling back to earlier hits: The Miracle Worker (1959) was about Helen Keller's young life, Monday after the Miracle (1982) was about her later life. Golda (1977) was a big-budget biodrama starring Anne Bancroft as the Israeli Prime Minister supported by a cast of dozens. Under the constraints of Broadway economics a quarter-century on, Golda's Balcony covers much of the same terrain but as a one-woman monologue for Tovah Feldshuh. Miss Feldshuh, as made up by John Caglione, Jr., with a prosthetic nose and thickened legs to suggest phlebitis, is a persuasive Golda Meir, especially in profile.

"In Gibson's monologue, Golda has, in fact, two balconies--one at her apartment in Tel Aviv overlooking the Mediterranean, the other an observation deck above the Israeli nuclear-weapons facility at Dimona. It's October 1973 and a seventy-five-year-old woman is pondering whether to unleash a nuclear holocaust. The events of Gibson's play are, within the bounds of dramatic license, historically accurate: it was the Yom Kippur War and the Prime Minister faced a tough decision on how far Israel was prepared to go in order to survive. As Gibson tells it, the bombs were loaded and the planes were ready to fly, awaiting the order to take off and nuke Cairo and Damascus. At the last minute, the Nixon Administration provided sufficient assistance to enable Israel to defeat its enemies with conventional weapons.

"Still, it’s riveting material for a dramatist. 'What happens when idealism becomes power?' Golda wonders. 'To save a world you create, how many worlds are you entitled to destroy?' What amazes in such situations is that the Prime Minister or President has only a few hours to make the right call. He or she needs to be able to concentrate, to see through every angle of the question, knowing there’s only one chance to answer it correctly."