"Remarkable performance by Valerie Harper in this one-woman show from the Broadway play focusing on Israel's former Prime Minister, Golda Meir's, critical decisions during the 1973 mid-East war."
You don’t have to be Jewish to love “Golda’s Balcony,” directed by Jeremy Kagan from William Gibson’s Broadway play. While one-person exhibitions are difficult to like, even less amenable to treatment on celluloid, Kagan’s movie is one of those wonderful exceptions. With a tour-de-force performance by Valerie Harper (age 66) in the role of Israel’s former Prime Minister Golda Meir (at age 56 during the 1973 Middle-Eastern war), “Golda’s Balcony” is among the most moving one-person shows I’ve seen either on stage or screen: alternately tearful, funny, and always majestic. Mrs. Meir is larger than life under Kagan’s direction just as she was in her own time in Israel, with Valerie Harper easily matching the powerful performance of Tovah Feldshuh at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater in 2003. While the film is produced by Valerie Harper’s husband, Tony Cacciotti, this is far from a mere vanity production, but is instead abounding with stories that give the audience insights into Israeli history, family conflict, and political epiphanies. Here is more proof that the printed page is not necessarily superior (snobbish views to the contrary) to the screen or stage, as a simple reading of the text would scarcely convey the depth of Ms. Harper’s riveting performance.
If the original play, delivered in Off-Broadway’s Manhattan Ensemble Theater, was given a deeper interpretation on the larger Helen Hayes location, then the filmed version–adding picture-in-picture plus backgrounds of archival film and black-and-white photographs to Ms. Harper’s portrayal of more than dozen characters–is even fuller.
Harper draws us into the personality, conflicts and all, of Israel’s leader, lending intimacy to what a typical Hollywood production would portray on far too large a scale. Dressed alternately in bathrobes, simple street clothes, and in one situation in full, black Arabic dress used as a disguise, Harper talks with us in the audience in much the way that Franklin D. Roosevelt chatted with his radio community when our president lent assurance and comfort to the American people at a time of our greatest crisis.
While director Kagan flashes back regularly in no straightforward chronological sequence, his focus is on the 1973 Yom Kippur War, one which Israel came close to losing–a defeat which would mean both the end of the Jewish State and likely suicide for its prime minister. Meir, who is awakened on Yom Kippur Day in 1973 to hear that a war that no-one was able to smell was now under way, moans that her tough defense minister Moshe Dayan, had been against launching a pre-emptive strike for fear of bringing on the world’s condemnation. (At that point, Meir mentions that Dayan is known for his many love affairs: “I wonder if he takes off the eye patch?”) Soviet leader Brezhnev had armed the enemy with missiles and Meir, hugging the telephone, frequently contacts the U.S. ambassador who is pleading with U.S. President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger to sent the phantom fighters that were promised. Without them, one surmises, there would be no Israel today--credit Nixon.
Within decades’ old archival film in the background, Golda, born Golda Mabovitch and later Golda Myerson after her marriage, tells us that her father had to nail boards to his door in her birthplace, Kiev, Russia, to protect the family from pogroms. Later they moved to Milwaukee where she was told she must work in her dad’s clothing store rather than attend high school, forcing Meir to move to her sister’s place in Denver. Courted by Morris Myerson, who wanted a good mother for the children he wished for, not a head of state, Meir responded to his proposal, “I don’t want to be your wife and I don’t want not to be your wife,” which proved to be perhaps the only time in her life that she did not exercise decisiveness.
Moving to a kibbutz where she was assigned the task of making matzoh balls (a far cry from her wish to redeem humanity), she witnesses the 1948 war between her new land and five Arab armies. On a speaking tour to address rich Jewish leaders in the U.S. she raises the astonishing sum of $50 million to buy armaments, largely from Czechoslovakia, and oversees a U.N. vote of 33-13 to grant an independent state to the Jewish people.
The moment of greatest tension in the film is also the segment that aroused the most controversy during the Broadway show. Meir tells us that Israel worked for ten years underground at Dimona to build nuclear bombs, telling the world that it was working on a desalinazation plant, then armed planes with nuclear devices to target military areas in the states with which Israel was at war in ‘73. To this day, Israel denies the charge that thermonuclear war was planned, and in fact does not respond even to queries about its nuclear program.
“Grant us the right to exist and no question cannot be answered,” says Meir, whose life is given a poignant, three-dimensional, loving performance from Valerie Harper. No happy-go-lucky “Rhoda,” this time around, Ms. Harper IS Ms. Meir.
~ HARVEY S. KARTEN, CompuServe ~
