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.”
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