Review: A Transgender Woman Struggles to Emerge From Her Hasidic Community in Becoming Eve

What’s lovely and remarkable about Emil Weinstein’s Becoming Eve, a smart and succinct adaptation of Abby Chava Stein’s 2019 memoir of the same title, is how extraordinarily specific a story it is. Stein was an ultra-orthodox rabbi, a leader in one of New York’s most prominent Hasidic families, when she left her marriage and community and came out as a transgender woman. You don’t hear about journeys quite like that every day, and Becoming Eve seldom flinches in keeping its subject narrow, its storytelling focused, especially as staged—tautly and gracefully—by Tyne Rafaeli for New York Theatre Workshop.

When Becoming Eve begins, Chava (Tommy Dorfman) has recruited another rabbi, Jonah (Brandon Uranowitz), to assist her in coming out to her father (Richard Schiff), the formidable descendant of the founder of the Hasidic movement. Chava needs Jonah to help her keep the conversation centered on a rabbinical commentary that suggests that the biblical Isaac was born with a female soul, only transformed into a male soul after God commanded Abraham, Isaac’s father, to sacrifice him. If she can explain transgender identity through the lens of trusted texts, Chava insists, maybe her father will understand and accept her.

As Chava struggles to reach the moment of her revelation, Weinstein intercuts flashback scenes that show Chava, represented by a series of growing bunraku-inspired puppets, over decades of discomfort in her body and world. The scenes of Chava’s hesitant coming-out crackle with so much tension that it’s inevitable that this intensity should dissipate somewhat in the flashbacks. But the puppetry work is lovely, especially as Dorfman shadows and sometimes mirrors each image of a younger self, a gorgeously staged reminder that Chava has always understood her body as if looking at it from the outside.

It’s not just a gender transition that Chava is navigating; even though she’s been out of her Hasidic enclave for nearly two years, she’s still brand-new to the English language, the Beatles, Romeo and Juliet, SpongeBob SquarePants (“A cheese with teeth!” Tati exclaims when he sees a SpongeBob toy for the first time). Chava, at home as she feels in her female body, continues to find her sea legs in a new world. “They live in a hermetically sealed 19^th-century village that happens to be in Brooklyn,” Chava explains of her family, and Becoming Eve thoughtfully engages with the complex entanglements of community and gender, how coming out as transgender requires her to break that hermetic seal and leave everything—not only maleness—behind.

Schiff, self-sabotagingly noble as Toby in The West Wing, is terrific in his return to a long-dormant stage career. It’s easy to imagine we’d like Tati quite a lot in a different context, if we didn’t fear him on Chava’s behalf, pre-judge his engrained bigotry for her sake. But Schiff’s Tati seems wise in his own way and pretty funny, too: “Thirteen children, 26 grandchildren—take that, Hitler!” he says by way of introduction. And Tati’s despair in his failure to bait Chava with reminders of her young son, whom she sees only rarely, is honest and sympathetic—he’s human, too.

Weinstein stumbles only in detailing the supporting characters beyond Chava and her father. Chava’s mother (a woefully underused Judy Kuhn) and wife (Tedra Millan) aren’t enough to help us trace the visions of womanhood—narrowed in the confined context of ultra-Orthodox law—with which Chava so strongly connects from early childhood onward. And Rabbi Jonah is such a paragon of angelic allyship that his persistent presence in Chava and Tati’s confrontation starts to tread water. Only in his characterization, despite the appealingly anxious performance from Uranowitz, does the play tip toward a didacticism otherwise scrupulously avoided.

How can we expect a nation to accept its children when even parents fail to do so? But as Jonah reminds Tati, God withdraws his command that Abraham kill Isaac: “He changes his mind. A miracle.” There’s no immediate miraculous conversion for Tati here; Becoming Eve is based on a memoir after all. But the play offers, in its astonishing specificity, a theatrical roadmap for affecting and effective art that doesn’t try to be all things to all people but pinpoints precise slivers of humanity to portray. In Chava’s particular plea for only her own humanity, Weinstein leaves room for a wider empathy to bloom. And in the face of a paralyzing federal movement to silence and erase transgender stories entirely, there might be a little bit of miracle in that.