Dorfman, Tommy

After disavowing her strict religious upbringing, Abby Stein came out as transgender. She is now the subject of a new play by New York Theater Workshop.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.Dorfman, in the background, with a puppet version of the young Chava and Richard Schiff as her father in the New York Theater Workshop production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More