The recent passing of former Israeli president and Prime Minister Shimon Peres is a poignant and timely backdrop to the New Jewish Theatre’s opening play of its 20th season, “Golda’s Balcony,” by William Gibson, featuring a stunning performance by Lavonne Byers in the one-woman show. 

Like Peres, Golda Meir, the Russian-born Zionist who grew up in Milwaukee, was among the founders of the modern State of Israel. She served in leadership positions in nearly every Israeli Cabinet from Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion until her passing in 1978.  Ben-Gurion convinced Goldie Myerson to change her name to Golda Meir to sound more authentically Israeli; he also referred to Meir—respectfully—as the “best man in my cabinet.”

Playwright Gibson conducted extensive in-depth interviews with Meir, and the script covers nearly every aspect of her life—the good, the bad and the ugly, and the many powerful personalities and major events that influenced and shaped her thinking and beliefs.

The story is replete with names of the people in Meir’s life, including her introverted intellectual husband Morris Myerson, who was her temperamental opposite. They separated, and he died in 1951. There are also great generals like Moshe Dayan, the man with the famous black eye patch, and Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s secretary of state at the time of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, among others. (The show’s program includes brief biographies of the people mentioned to help audiences follow along.)

Still, the play gets bogged down in the “weeds” of various events at times, though it makes clear that Meir’s life was very complicated and filled with memorable occasions. Among them: the time she was Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1948 and visited the Choral Synagogue in Moscow where she was mobbed by thousands of previously “silent” Soviet Jews, through her days of courageous fundraising for the infant Jewish State after its very existence was threatened soon after Ben-Gurion proclaimed its independence.

Byers’ stirring performance as Meir manages to compensate for any occasional draginess. Skillfully directed by Henry Schvey, Byers seems to channel the Israeli prime minister, mastering her voice —a mash-up of a flat Milwaukee accent, a Russian childhood and modern Hebrew—as well as her walk, mannerisms and even her chain smoking.  It is a good thing the actress was smoking e-cigarettes, lest she develop emphysema by the end of the 95 minutes on stage, without an intermission.

The script makes it clear that Meir was not a Yiddish version of Mother Teresa. She herself shunned the mythic representations of her as the “Goldena Golda,” who spent her days making matzah ball soup. She did make matzah ball soup on her kibbutz, but remarked that there was “blood on the bottom the the pot.”

The action in the play takes place in Golda’s office in Jerusalem, in 1976 and the past, as the retired Meir reflects on the triumphs and tragedies of her life. In her opening monologue, Meir says, “I’m old, I’m tired. I’m sick. Dying—the doctors tell me so. At the end of my story.”

As she is speaking the background sound is a mixture of the guns and bombs of warfare and the mournful Bach Sarabande from the “5th Cello Suite.”  From time to time she pauses in what she is saying to firmly assert, “I can do without that music!”  She resents the over-sentimentalism of the mythic image of her life and works.

Meir is constantly struggling to balance her youthful idealism with the harsh realities of practical leadership.

The most powerful drama in the play involves the 1973 war, which the playwright and honest historians make clear was the war that Israel almost lost.  General Moshe Dayan, the hero of the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six-Day War, is described as having been caught totally off-guard and to have been in a virtual panic, considering a surrender until General Ariel Sharon did an end run around Egypt’s Third Army to bring the war to an end.

As we mourn the recent passing of Peres, a respected fellow founder of Israel with Meir, it is appropriate that we look back in awe and admiration at her trials, tribulations and triumphs and the fact that she always saw what was necessary for Israel’s future from the perspective of her balcony.