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    Review: ‘Becoming Eve’ Offers Testaments Old and New

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    A trans woman comes out to her Hasidic Jewish father in this Off Broadway play that tussles with faith and family bonds.A few minutes into “Becoming Eve,” an inventive, sympathetic Off Broadway play produced by New York Theater Workshop at Abrons Arts Center, Chava (Tommy Dorfman), a college student, executes an abrupt costume change. Though she bursts onto the set, the makeshift sanctuary of a synagogue on the Upper West Side, in a cropped pink sweatshirt and flowered minidress, she soon runs into a side room and emerges in loose jeans and a drab, body-camouflaging hoodie. From her original look, only a pair of pink sneakers remain.Even this outfit (Enver Chakartash designed the costumes) is daring in its way. Chava was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. So if these jeans are comparatively modest, they remain far more modern than the clothes that Chava grew up in, which were men’s clothes. Chava is trans, and she has arrived at this sanctuary to come out to her father, Tati (Richard Schiff), an ultraorthodox rabbi.“Becoming Eve,” written by Emil Weinstein and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is based on Abby Chava Stein’s memoir of the same name. In her 20s, Stein left her community and her religion, then she came out as trans. (Stein has since returned to Judaism, and is a rabbi at a progressive congregation in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.) Though mostly set within that sanctuary (designed by Arnulfo Maldonado, with dramatic lighting by Ben Stanton), the play also includes flashbacks of Chava as a child and adolescent and as a young husband. In these sections, Chava is played by a series of puppets (expertly designed by Amanda Villalobos and deployed by two puppeteers). Dorfman, standing nearby, voices these scenes.Because Chava knows that her father lives untouched by the modern world (with heavy restrictions on the internet and most media) and that he is allergic to sentiment, Chava has found biblical commentary that seems to argue her case. To help her, she has enlisted Jonah (Brandon Uranowitz), the chatty, empathetic rabbi of this progressive synagogue. The play allows for heady scriptural dialogue, which speaks to Weinstein and Rafaeli’s faith in the audience’s intelligence. (One reasonable concession: These Yiddish conversations are rendered in English.)But the show is perhaps too intellectual and careful. Weinstein and Rafaeli, in a laudable effort to be fair to all, exercise perhaps too light a touch. (Regarding the women in Chava’s life, Judy Kuhn as her mother, Mami, and Tedra Millan as Fraidy, her wife, that touch is feather light; they are given little to do.) There are no villains here, no victims, which seems right and yet it results in a reticence that extends to Dorfman’s performance.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

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      From Hasidic Brooklyn to Off Broadway: The Life of a Trans Rabbi

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      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