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Washington Jewish Week

A morality play 'Mikveh' provides glimpse of insular community
by Lisa Traiger
Arts Correspondent

The rituals of mikvah are among the most private in Judaism. Women who follow the laws of family purity, immersing themselves once a month in a ritual bath, do so only in the evening, typically by appointment. Their husbands don't accompany them, and can't even wait in the nearby parking lot.

Visits to the mikvah are meant to be private, neither discussed nor acknowledged by anyone who might see a woman entering or exiting the ritual bathhouse. This month, Theater J, at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, pulls back the curtain of this ancient practice most often, but not exclusively, followed by married Orthodox women of child-bearing age.

Mikveh, by British-born, Israeli playwright Hadar Galron, premiered at Tel Aviv's Beit Lessin Theatre in 2004 and drew Israeli audiences from across the social and religious spectrum. The drama, set in a fervently Orthodox community, was voted play of the year.

Theater J's production, onstage through June 5, makes public this most hidden, and little understood Orthodox practice. Galron's play centers on a sisterhood of women who happen to find themselves together once a month in the sterile waiting room of a modest mikvah in an unknown Israel town. The women -- a prominent rabbi's wife, a busy young mother, a nervous bride-to-be, a secular wife of a newly Orthodox husband and an upstanding pillar of the community -- are types, but as the play develops, the actors imbue their characters with veracity and spirit.

Shoshana, the severe chief mikvah attendant, follows the proscriptions of Halacha, Jewish law, to the letter, while eschewing the mystical and spiritual effects that many attain by practicing ritual immersion. But the play isn't about the ritual; it's instead a moral conflict played out between old-guard Shoshana and newcomer Shira, the recently hired mikvah attendant with fresh and seemingly radical ideas about this ancient practice.

Israeli designer Kinereth Kisch has built a pool of living waters on Theater J's stage. That it hovers above and behind the brightly lit, bleak waiting room with its molded plastic chairs and linoleum tile floor demonstrates materially the separateness and sacredness inherent in the ritual. With a shimmering, ocean-blue background, the sparsely lit pool seems to float in an infinite, otherworldly light (lighting designer Dan Covey's) suggesting a sacred, private space for the women to immerse and transform themselves religiously. The Hebrew blessing said upon immersion scrolls above the pool.

Director Shirley Serotsky pulls back the curtain on the ritual for uninitiated audiences: Viewers see the women immerse, completely nude, behind a translucent curtain. Modestly positioned and sculpturally lit, it's a beautiful tribute to the mitzvah -- ritual commandment. These private moments, one at the start of the play, another two later in the evening, embody the sacred and the spiritual in a holy act.

I find it hard for any but the most fervent fundamentalist or modest viewers to object to this rendition of the practice. Serotsky's mikvah moment reflects in its quiet dignity the Jewish concept of hiddur mitzvah, or beautifying a ritual act. Other examples of this ritual beautification range from using one's best silver candlesticks on Friday night, wearing an elaborately embroidered tallit or saying prayers using an intricately engraved Kiddush cup.

Galron fills her plot with plenty of intrigue, melodrama and, ultimately, high-strung fireworks. There's a mysterious death, an unhappy marriage, a daughter who has rejected the community, and abundant gossip and innuendo for the women to feed on.

Ironically, the modesty of the mikvah demands that what happens there remains there and can never be spoken about outside its sacred walls. At this mikvah, the secrets fester alongside lighthearted jokes and chitchat. Like many contemporary Israeli plays, Mikveh builds to an incendiary climax.

Once the conflicts are laid out, it's mostly a breath-catching roller-coaster ride to the end, one that leaves viewers a little weak-kneed as the multiple dramatic conceits come together. Yet, playwright Galron, who is developing her drama for the Israeli screen, has penned more than a voyeuristic peek into an insular community.

At its core, Mikveh is a morality play. The two attendants clash on issues large and small, halachic (whether nail polish is permitted for a first-time immersion) and moral (whether obvious abuse should be acknowledged and reported).

The moral conundrum these women struggle with demands that attention be paid. One woman's life crumbles as her community -- the women of the mikvah -- turns a blind eye to her bruises. The moral imperative to act versus turning away is played out strikingly by Mikveh's two leads: dean of Washington actresses implacable Sarah Marshall as Shoshana, and Lise Bruneau, the modern-thinking newcomer Shira.

Amal Saade is also a standout as the nervous, conflicted young bride, while Tonya Beckman Ross adds spice and a secular twist as Miki, the only nonreligious woman in this club. Matronly Esti is played with aplomb by Helen Pafumi sporting a sheitel; Carla Briscoe's Chedva, the battered wife who won't talk, adds a painful undercurrent to the proceedings.

Theater J has taken tremendous care to present Mikveh in a modest and appropriate fashion. For those who will take affront to seeing a female body immerse, this play -- as many others at Theater J and elsewhere -- is not for them. For others who seek a glimpse of a community to which most non-Orthodox Jews don't have access, Mikveh is an interesting cultural glimpse behind the curtain.

Foremost, though, Mikveh focuses on two strong women who wrestle with their own moral truths and how they live with their choices and what those reflect or reject within this most-Orthodox of sects.

Aside from its ethical underpinnings, Mikveh gives voice to seven women in a powerful play that features no male characters. It recalls great American Jewish playwright Wendy Wasserstein's first stage work, Uncommon Women, which also featured no men. She famously said she wrote her own work for an all-female cast because she wanted to see only women stand and bow for the curtain call.

Theater J's latest production -- part of the Voices of a Changing Middle East: Women's Voices festival -- pays quiet homage to the late Wasserstein in its own moving bow and throughout by giving voice to an often silent subset of Jewish women.

Washington City Paper

Mikveh  By Hadar Galron; Directed by Shirley Serotsky 

The cleansing power of rainwater meets the abrasive power of modernity in Mikveh, an uneven melodrama about domestic abuse and budding feminism in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood in Israel.

Hadar Galron’s play—an Israeli hit receiving its English language premiere at Theater J—is set in a bathhouse, and looks at the practical impact on the community of the Laws of Family Purity, which, as posited in the Torah, prohibit intercourse with a menstruating woman on grounds that she is ritually impure. Tradition has it that immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath) on the evening of her seventh post-menstrual day cleanses her, making her fit once again for sexual relations.

Mikveh attendant Shoshana (Sarah Marshall) presides over this private ceremony with unquestioning efficiency, making sure the community’s women arrive at her mikveh pool with no traces of makeup or nail polish, and that they emerge suitably purified. Her customers—who include a frightened bride, a politician’s wife, a flibbertigibbet, and an aging gossip—rely on Shoshona’s discretion. The mikveh is one of the few places they can let their hair down, so to speak. But if there’s camaraderie, there’s also a shared sense of denial.

Looking on from the outside, it’s hard not to see these women as victims in a patriarchal belief system that tells them to be ashamed of their bodies. They don’t seem to see themselves that way, but their behavior speaks for them. An attendant recently drowned herself in a fit of depression; the politician’s wife always comes in bruised and claiming to have fallen; her 11-yr-old daughter’s not uttered a sound in years; the bride seems more terrified after marriage than she was before the wedding. And for reasons that only gradually become clear, all are nervous about the mikveh’s new hire, Shira (no-nonsense Lise Bruneau).

Shirley Serotsky’s staging—bright and brisk, if rarely emotionally persuasive—makes smart use of a back wall that dissolves on occasion to reveal an onstage pool and its naked occupants. The script being an uneasy mix of argumentative comedy and movie-of-the-week bathos, there’s not a lot of room for nuance. Still, a number of the city’s better actresses do their damnedest with lines that are either too on-the-nose (“can’t you see the lies, the rot”), or self-consciously pointed (“My mother can’t watch the children tonight because she’s having a really rough pregnancy”).

The Women, it’s not. Every ring of the phone brings exposition; every knock at the door, a complication, the most welcome being the arrival of Tonya Beckman Ross as a brash, bottle-blonde newcomer perplexed by her hubby’s conversion to orthodoxy. Ross is comic relief, and knows it, bless her. And her role provides a counterweight to those of her more devout sisters—Bruneau being the evening’s conscience, Marshall its unrebellious scold, and so on.

It’s easy enough to understand why the earnest social critique offered in Mikveh, tiptoeing carefully on a tightrope between religious and secular points of view, might find a public in Israel; less clear is what it has to offer mainstream audiences at Theater J. In an auditorium where almost no one wears a head scarf, and many of the men would likely call themselves feminists, the play’s balancing act smacks less of evenhandedness than of a desperate attempt not to offend.

Metro Weekly - 4 Stars

Feast and Famine
Theater J's Mikvah is familiar and wonderful

By Tom Avila
Published on May 12, 2010, 10:39pm

There is something about Hadar Galron's Mikveh that seems familiar. This would not seem so strange were it not for the fact that Theater J's production is actually the English language, world premiere of the Israeli writer's play. Were it not for the fact that it's not every day (at least not in Washington) where you open a program to be informed – where the ''Time'' of the play is listed – that it is Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the new month in the lunar Jewish calendar. Or that the year is 5764.

It's not every day that Sarah Marshall wanders out as the audience is taking its seats to fold a few towels and check on the bright orange goldfish swimming slowly around its bowl onstage.

But despite how ''different'' things seem to be on the surface, no matter whether the ritual bath of the mikveh is a part of your tradition or as far from your experience as you can imagine, there is something familiar here. Not comforting. But familiar.

The story of eight very different women and the manner in which their lives intersect at the mikveh (a precisely executed ritual bath in the Orthodox Jewish tradition for the purpose of restoring purity), Galron's play is the theatrical equivalent of a chick flick. It's Thelma and Louise meets Steel Magnolias meets Beauty Shop meets... well... something Orthodox and Jewish. That's why it feels so familiar and what ultimately makes it enjoyable if not necessarily groundbreaking.

Shoshana (Marshall), the mikveh attendant, is finally getting some help after an accident results in the death of her former co-worker. The new attendant, Shira (Lise Bruneau), comes from outside the community and rumors about her outspoken manner arrive well before she does. To some of the women, like the immaculately put-together Hindi (Kim Schraf), Shira is a threat to the well-orchestrated silence that keeps trouble out of sight and out of mind. To others, like the troubled bride-to-be Tehila (Amal Saade) and the secular pop singer Miki (Tonya Beckman Ross) she's a bright light in the cloistered darkness.

Marshall is perfectly wonderful in the role of Shoshana. Her measured grace and deeply nuanced performance is marked by a kind of underplaying. No large gestures. No big movements. It's a lovely turn that ties wonderfully to the rest of the ensemble.

Bruneau gives great shape to the role of Shira, a role that could easily dissolve into a one-dimensional, liberated woman caricature. Bruneau invests her talents wisely, bringing a simple spontaneity to the stage. It's as though the character's life is truly unfolding before our eyes.

Mention must also be made of the performances delivered by Schraf, as a truly great bitch, and Beckman Ross, as a truly great bitch whom you'd want to go out drinking with. In the end, it's the chemistry and connectedness of the entire ensemble of strong female actors that succeeds in making Mikveh something quite wonderful. Familiar, and wonderful.

Mikveh

May 17, 2010 By Tim Treanor

A ritual is a device by which we give ourselves over to a set of predetermined behaviors, thus eliminating any possibility of choice or decision. At its best, it allows us to release our egos, and rest our minds in the cradle of God’s hands. It is always, though, a form of social control.

This is true when the ritual is high mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame and when it is the morning chant at an ashram on the plains of India, and even when it is in a venue as cheery and modern as a locker room, and administered by someone as experienced and friendly as Shoshana (Sarah Marshall). This is the mikveh, which is (among other things) a place where Orthodox women go to ritually cleanse themselves after menstruation, and reinforce the social bonds of Orthodox Judaism – including, in Hadar Galron’s take, forced marriage, forced childbirth and wife-beating.

I do not know if this colossal indictment of Orthodox society is just or not, but it is dramatically compelling. Galron won a “production of the year” award in 2004 in Israel, and the dramatic bones of the piece are solid, if not entirely polished. Shira (Lise Bruneau) has joined the mikveh as an assistant after having been fired from her previous place of employment because her penchant for ferreting out uncomfortable truths made everyone…uncomfortable. She starts down the same path almost immediately at the mikveh, by drawing attention to facts which have previously escaped Shoshana’s “don’t ask…don’t tell” approach to information.

The most important of these facts is that Chedva (Carla Briscoe) is getting the hell kicked out of her by her husband, an up-and-coming Israeli politician – and that the evidence of his beatings is revealed when she stands naked in the mikveh bath (there is brief nudity in this play). The net effect of this scandalous, (and illegal, under halacha, the Jewish law) behavior is that Chedva’s daughter Ellishiva (Rachel Condliffe) is rendered an elective mute. Chedva is also mute, in a more conventional way, insisting that her multiple injuries are due to her propensity for falling down stairs. Shira – like the audience – knows the truth, and her struggle to shine a light on this brutality in the face of the other women’s impulse to cover it up is the dramatic weight of the play.

Shira’s outsider ways rankle the mikveh regulars, and in particular the acid-tongued, self-regarding Hindi (Kimberly Schraf) and the amusing nincompoop Esti (Helen Pafumi). Hindi and Esti together represent the community’s conspiracy of silence, and the way women – and victims generally – collaborate in their own oppression. They, even more than Shoshana, are sensitive to Shira’s challenge to Shoshana’s authority – and to its consequence, noting that Chedva’s brutal husband is not only Shoshana’s boss but the man who found Shira her job at the mikveh. They want nothing less than Shira’s removal, and a restoration of the uneasy peace which existed before she came to the place.

The first Act is stuffed – perhaps overstuffed – with characters and their dilemmas. Shari spends her nights at the mikveh, for reasons which are not clear until near the end of the Act. A young bride-to-be, Tehila (Amai Saade), struggles to find a way out of the marriage her parents have arranged for her. Shiri’s predecessor dies under mysterious circumstances. Miki (Tonya Beckman Ross), a popular singer, agrees to undergo the mikveh ceremony because her husband has recently converted to Orthodoxy and will not have sex with her unless she submits to the ceremony. Even Shoshanna seems fraught with demons, as her daughter, for reasons not clear at the outset, seeks secret communication with her.

Things become clearer in Act two, in which Chedva can no longer hide her secret, and the other women come to understand the moral and emotional consequences of their own cover-up.  In America (Theater J is giving the first English-language production of the play), it may be difficult to understand the coercive power of social control, as we tend to resolve our conflicts by firing up our immense judiciary system, or else through the vigorous exercise of our Second-Amendment rights. But in the Israeli Orthodox culture, as in most of the rest of the world, the desire to please society – tradition, if you will – is a powerful force, and to see the mikveh participants calculate the cost of tradition to their lives is an exercise in profound sadness. When even Hindi reveals her (somewhat implausible) secret, and what it cost her, the mikveh participants resolve to stand firm against the “Modesty Patrol”, which wants to commit Chedva, now an accuser, to a mental institution.

This is an exciting story, told in an exciting way…and yet. And yet. Most of the subplots misfire. An offstage character, who, because the Rabbi has condemned contraceptives, had become pregnant though it gravely risked her health, commits suicide – apparently not noticing that suicide is an even greater risk to her health. A character has an asthma attack in order to advance the plot, but to that point we have had no clue that she suffered from a breathing disorder. Shashana secretly subsidizes her daughter, who has been excommunicated from the community for some unspecified crime, but eventually her husband will notice the drain on the family fisc, and have something to say. Miki, who is a delightful and well-drawn character (and right in Ross’ wheelhouse; she is magnificent in this role), nonetheless does not advance the story in any significant way. Worst of all, Tehelia is almost wholly irrelevant to the plot; her dilemma – her husband is loving and attractive, but she pines for a man she barely met – is not compelling, given the circumstances of the story as a whole. (A document called “Mikvelongsynopsis 13508-1” turned up in response to my Google search. It gives a much different plot, in which Tehelia’s crisis is more central, to the story). What’s more, the resolution of Tehelia’s dilemma undercuts the play’s resolution, which is difficult to believe in any event.

Shirley Serotsky’s cast gives the play every chance to succeed, and the fact that it does, on balance, is hugely due to the performances. Of course, no play which features the immensely gifted Marshall can go far wrong. Here she plays a character immediately recognizable – the very capable functionary, called upon to make decisions beyond her usual scope – by hitting all the grace notes. Bruneau, too, finds Shira’s grace and brings it forward, thus turning a character who could be shrill and preachy into a genuine heroine. All of the performances are at least convincing and several of them – Pafumi and Ross especially – are also highly engaging. Kinereth Kisch’s beautifully-designed set – the ritual bath is behind a scrim, and it becomes visible through Dan Covey’s lighting design – works here, as it must have worked in the original Israeli production.

Notwithstanding its award, Mikveh the play has the feel of a work in progress, but the production has all cylinders firing.

Mikveh

By Hadar Galron
Directed by Shirley Serotsky
Produced by Theater J
Reviewed by Tim Treanor

We Love DC
We Love Arts: Mikveh
By Jenn Larsen, 3:00 pm May 10th, 2010

What is our personal responsibility to others in the face of repression and abuse? Do you interfere in someone else’s life when you see injustice? To act or to collude in silence… and while we argue about the need for action, what’s happening to those suffering right behind our backs?

Mikveh, playing now through June 5 in its English language world premiere at Theater J, is not really a play about religion, though it takes place in the confines of an orthodox community in Israel. Rather, it’s a play about the moral battle between action and inaction. It also highlights how women’s territorial natures cripple them – as they police themselves from within, they are being policed by others from without. Their inability to rise above petty jealousies can be detrimental, sometimes to the extreme.

Though the action centers around the mikveh itself (a ritual bath, here used mainly to purify post-menstruant women), you don’t need a background in the Talmud or Family Purity Laws to understand the play. That’s what I love about Theater J, no matter the subject, there’s a dedication to clarity and consistent storytelling, always marked by strong ensemble acting and high production values. Mikveh is no exception – though at times the play veers dangerously close to a Jewish Orthodox version of The Women (the gossipy babymachine, the uppercrust bitch, the abused wife, etc.) – it’s worth it to explore these issues with such powerful actors. They are ably helmed by director Shirley Serotsky, whose handling of Hadar Galron’s engaging script mines the truth behind stereotypes.

Plays that take place in a confined space live or die by the scenic design, and here Kinerath Kisch has created two simultaneous worlds. The women are caught between the sterile waiting room and ritual bath itself, with Dan Covey’s lighting beautifully delineating each space – the mixture of the harsh real world and the dreamy spiritual one.

As the divide between sacred space and the mundane exists in the location, so it does in the two characters facing off – the idealistic outsider Shira and the practical oldtimer Shoshana. Shira has come to the mikveh from outside the community and has a decidedly individual approach that immediately shakes up the women’s expectations. The seemingly placid and cheery community hides some unsavory secrets, abuse of many kinds, and as the longtime attendant of the bath Shosana is not about to let anyone rock that rigid boat.

One of the chief joys of this production is watching these two slowly build tension until it inevitably erupts, and that conflict is in the extremely capable hands of Lise Bruneau and Sarah Marshall, respectively. I’m not sure I will ever tire of these actors, whose honesty and dedication to the text and the ensemble are always striking. Their battle royale at the end of the first half is an acting master class on how to raise the stakes with emotional committment and technique that never grates.

“I received God like a birthday present,” Shira says of her mother’s late conversion to orthodoxy, in one of the many striking lines that keeps playwright Galron’s plot from diving too deep into stereotypes. As Shira and Shoshana struggle, the women around them fall into the classic archetypes of the “women’s issues” genre, previously mentioned. As community gossip and perpetual babymaker Esti and uptight wealthy matron Hindi, Helen Pafumi and Kimberly Schraf have great fun playing off of each other. It’s problematic, definitely, the propensity to fall into cliche, but somehow I wasn’t bothered by it too much – after all, these stereotypes exist because they can be true.

Shira is fighting against tradition to rescue battered wife Chedva, whose initial denials are spot-on simple by Carla Briscoe. When she finally lets reality in and details her abuse in a monologue more painful because every cliche detailed is true and happens every day, it’s a punch in the stomach. Her pale silent daughter Elisheva, well done by young actor Rachel Condliffe, is a living reminder of the guilt of inaction.

Entering this sterile and traditional environment come two more rebels in their own right – nervous new bride Tehila (Amal Saade, charging and faltering like a wounded deer) contrasted with tarted-up singer Miki (Tonya Beckman Ross, instantly energizing the air). Tehila’s arranged marriage is driving her deeper into panic, a fear brushed off by everyone with devastating consequences. Though she receives plenty of advice from all the different factions, none of them will do any good. We the audience can see this, but sadly the characters cannot.

In the end, Mikveh rises above the genre because of the brilliantly strong ensemble acting and a genuine desire by the playwright to examine these issues fairly. It may seem a bit crowded and chaotic towards the end, and the final shock should be expected, but still it’s a riveting piece about the power we wield to silence voices, both of others and of our own.