Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Rabbi, what did I just say to you?

Rabbi Abby Chava Stein: You are not the first person to make that mistake.

Alison Stewart: Rabbi Abby Chava Stein comes from a very prominent Hasidic family here in Williamsburg. Stein was trained from a young age to be a rabbi and has always known that she was a girl years before she learned what it meant to be a trans woman. Rabbi Stein wrote a memoir about her experience coming out and leaving the Hasidic community, and now, that memoir has been turned into a play. Tommy Dorfman stars as Chava. We meet her as she's preparing to reveal to her parents that she has transitioned.

She's done research into Jewish text to provide context around her trans identity that she thinks her parents can understand. When only her dad shows up to the meeting, Chava knows things might not go as planned. The play is called Becoming Eve. The show also includes amazing puppets who play young Chava in different stages of her life. It's running at the Abrons Arts Center through April 27th. Just this morning, the play was nominated for three Drama League awards, including Outstanding Production of a Play and a Distinguished Performance nomination for Tommy Dorfman. I'm joined now by Rabbi Abby Chava Stein. Hi, Rabbi.

Abby: Hi.

Alison Stewart: And actor Tommy Dorfman, who plays Chava.

Tommy Dorfman: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Nice to meet you.

Tommy: So nice to meet you.

Alison Stewart: How did the idea to turn your story into a play come about, Abby? I was going to call you Abby because Rabbi--

Abby: No, Abby is perfect.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Abby: I said that, actually, one of the talkbacks last week of the show that when I chose that name 10 years ago, I wasn't planning to ever work as a rabbi again, which I am doing right now. My day job currently is as a rabbi in Brooklyn, so it is partially my fault, and I will take it. Maybe I should start going by Rabbi Chava. It will also be hard to pronounce, but in a different way. I'm going to be fully honest, the idea came from the commercial producers who are Brian and Dayna Lee, who are amazing, and this amazing Jewish couple from Toronto who I got to work with for the past five years.

They reached out to me and to my agent, my literary agent, at the beginning of COVID. Our first meeting was on Zoom already, when most of us barely knew what Zoom was. They were like, "We think this is a great story." The story, what actually happened is that I think Brian's mom, one of their producers' mom has seen or read the book as part of a book club in her hometown Jewish Book Club scene. Don't know exactly what the story was. They were like, "We would love to turn it into a play." I'm like, "Okay."

I'm going to be honest that I knew very little about the theater industry. I trust my agent a lot. I'm like, "Let's talk about it. Let's see what we have to say." I had a conversation with them, and what I will say and something that has stayed true to every moment of the show and actually comes across very powerfully, and one of the reasons why I was like, "Okay, I think I'm going to work with you and we'll sign rights, we'll try to make this happen," was that one of the things that I told them is that this book and my story are not about Hasidic people bad.

This is not the story. Obviously, I have a lot of fundamental disagreements with that community. I left for many reasons, but I really wanted to come across as like, "Yes, there's a lot of struggles. There's a lot of transphobia, there's homophobia, there's a lot we need to work on, but there's also beauty. There's also a lot of intense conversations to have. There's a lot of depth in the Jewish texts around gender and sexuality." I was like, "If we can make this happen, we'll do it."

Alison Stewart: You want to have a nuance?

Abby: Yes. They were like, "This is what we want." I think five years later, Tommy's doing a great job making that happen.

Alison Stewart: Tommy, why did you want to be involved in this production?

Tommy: I cannot take credit for making it happen other than I'm--

Alison Stewart: You're really good, though.

Tommy: That's very, very kind. Thank you. I'm really honored to get to be a part of this next chapter of Becoming Eve and bringing your story to audiences in a visual way and through a different kind of language. For me, I read the script. I was doing Romeo + Juliet on Broadway, and was not thinking I would go right into another play after a 20-week run. I read the script, and I fell in love with Emil's writing and poetry. I devoured Abby's book. I thought, "If I had an opportunity to do this, I would do whatever it takes to get that job, and give it my best shot."

I just fell in love with the love in the story and maintaining that love. Even in conflict, there is still a desire to find balance and paradox to thrive in, in some way. It felt like a really unique opportunity. I'd never worked with puppetry before. For me, as an actor, when I'm looking at things I want to pursue, I want to make sure that I'm going to learn something in the process. This is a wellspring of things I knew nothing about.

Alison Stewart: On a real practical level, you work in a big Broadway, and this is a much smaller, more intimate show. What does that provide you creatively?

Tommy: It's been the most incredible journey these last nine months or so of working consistently. It offers-- The intimacy of Circle in the Square is not so different than the intimacy of Abrons Arts Center, actually, in the way that we were in the round. While there were about 800 seats and there's about 350, it's one of the smaller Broadway houses. I could see every single person at Circle in the Square. At Becoming Eve, it's actually quite liberating because I'm not in the round. I only see the first three rows, and so it's proscenium.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Tommy: In a weird way, it feels less intimate, actually, but there is something quite, I think, cinematic about Tyne's directing in particular, and there's a focus to the play that does draw people in, to paying attention to every little detail. I think the biggest distinction is I just don't leave the stage in Becoming Eve at all. That is something that took me some time to get accustomed to.

Abby: That seems hard, and I can say that. I also want to say, I agree what you said about Tyne specifically, because I've had conversations with Tyne and with Emil for years now. Specifically, I saw it during rehearsals and even during tech, where time was just constantly like, "Okay, I'm not feeling this. This needs to draw my attention. This needs to happen." Knowing what are the details that we want to focus on. Some conversations that I have with her specifically towards with the final scene of the play without too many spoilers, but I really helped a lot with bringing in some ideas.

"Here's what we can do. Here's a reading we can do. Here's rendition we can do." She was just constantly like, "This is what I want people to feel, coming in with a very clear vision of this is what we want people to feel, and how do we make that happen?" I think you bring this to life in a very intense way, you, Brandon, Richard, and everyone else on stage. It's amazing and powerful for me knowing so little about theater, but hearing first a vision from Emil, from Tyne, and then seeing it on stage successfully accomplished is so beautiful.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Rabbi Abby Chava Stein and Tommy Dorfman. We are talking about Becoming Eve, which is based on Abby's memoir of the same name. Abby, you come from a prominent family within the Hasidic community. Yes?

Abby: The reason I'm-- for those who can't see me, obviously, I'm breathing a bit intensely. There is one of the people that are mentioned in the play that Tommy, as Chava mentions, which is Zaidy, which is my grandfather actually passed away three days ago.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I'm sorry.

Abby: There's been a lot of feelings and emotions, and he played a huge impact on me from the day I was born till three days ago, till today, which is why I had this very intense breath when you mentioned that.

Alison Stewart: We can move on.

Abby: No, no, we can talk about it. We can 100% talk about it. I'm just explaining why-- It's not bad. No, actually, it helps to talk about it. It's just like, I'm explaining why I had this intense reaction.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. What kind of expectations were placed on you as a young person?

Abby: The better question would maybe be what kind of expectations were not placed? What I mean by that is that everything was written out. I like to joke with people that you were born, you eat, and you breathe, and then when you're three years old, you have an upshiren, which is a scene that is mentioned in the book several, like your first haircut. When you're 13, you have a bar mitzvah. Another scene that is mentioned in the play as well. When you're 17 and 18, you get engaged and married. It is kind of like what you do.

What I mean everything is prescribed, I mean everything. I know Tommy also knows that from the costumes and from other things, nothing is left up to chance. From the kind of shoes that you wear to the underwear, to the blessings that you make before and after going to the bathroom, how you dress, the kind of food that you eat, literally everything. I think in my family, specifically because of kind of like the rabbinical dynasty that they take so serious. I've had one of the feedback someone said, told me about the play is that, "Oh, there seems to be such a strong focus on the lineage."

Like Tati, played by Richard Schiff, like mentioned several times, like the Baal Shem Tov, who's the founder of the Hasidic movement and a very important figure. I had to tell this person who made this comment that this is still not as intense as I grew up with it. There's this intense expectations that you're going to follow a very, very specific path. Even within the community, there were some things that other Hasidic people could do that we couldn't. Even jobs, like most Hasidic people can work in almost any field that they are good at.

I was expected to do something, let's call it Judaica, whether teach or be a rabbi, or be a teacher at a school, or work as a religious cry, but relatively limited amount of things that you can do from the minute you were born till after your funeral.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Tell me. You are on stage, as you said, almost the whole entire play. It's very interesting because Chava is portrayed by puppetry. It's really beautiful.

Tommy: Sure. I think the physical expression of Chava is puppetry.

Alison Stewart: It really is. It is. You do the voice-

Tommy: In the past.

Alison Stewart: -which is--

Tommy: Yes, which I think is also performance.

Alison Stewart: Well, tell me a little bit about learning to do that kind of performance because that's different than you talking than we watching you.

Tommy: No, it's completely different. It's the closest experience I've had to being like a voiceover actor almost, in a sense, except I am lit on stage and very present. I think the great liberation of it is that I don't have to necessarily detransition to tell Chava's story in this format. To play a character from ages 3 to 25 is one of the big reasons I wanted to do this play. It felt like a challenge that I had never been presented with in my artistry before. It's just really exciting to think about where in the body certain ages live. That's my process as an actor.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting. Tell me more about that.

Tommy: What I found in research and working with-- I work with Julia Crockett, who works with Sarah Paulson and Rachel McAdams, a bunch of different amazing actors. She's incredible. Julia is this incredible movement acting coach. We just spent a couple hours together playing with each age because I didn't have a lot of time. I had overlap rehearsal between Romeo + Juliet and this. When you're younger, you talk from a higher space. It's not just in your register. It's an energetic space, like your crown Chakra. There's excitement.

Actually, the same thing happens when you get older again. The same thing happens when you get older again. Your crown chakra sort of opens up, and then your teenage years, you start to get your voice, you start to get some autonomy of thinking, maybe not in the environment you live in, which is an issue that Chava's obviously presented with, but that did not stop her from being a very outspoken teenager and young adult and adolescent and adult.

Abby: I think it exists. It exists even in that community on a different level, but it definitely exists.

Tommy: For me, I knew transitioning into teenage voice, it was going to come from here. Then when you go into marriage and adulthood, you have a sexual awakening. Stuff starts to come from your root chakra. I can say sexual on NPR, right?

Alison Stewart: You can.

Tommy: On WNYC. That offered me a toolkit to quickly shift, because I have to shift within-- Sometimes there's less than a second in between ages. There's a section of prayer that happens where Chava starts praying at six years old. Then during the same prayer, Chava enters at 13, the day before her bar mitzvah. Her dad's going to come in and teach her how to do tefillin.

I think that I had to really spend a lot of time placing those things in my body so that I could easily access them, and then immediately go back into the present moment, which is Chava, 14 months into her transition, having a really challenging conversation with her father using centuries old text about the Akedah from one of their-- an interpretation of the Akedah from a rabbi that is also one of their ancestors that talks about a female soul being born inside of a male body. That's kind of--

Alison Stewart: My son's name is Isaac.

Tommy: That's my golden ticket.

Abby: Beautiful.

Tommy: That's my golden ticket. That was the process. It's exceptional to work with puppetry artists because it offers a different kind of collaboration of a deep, deep focus of work.

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes.

Tommy: Breathwork together as a company. Sometimes there's four or five of us moving as one organism, playing the same energy and character. I think we spend a lot of time where I would block it with my physical body, and then they would come in with puppetry, and then I would match their puppetry.

Alison Stewart: It's sort of funny when you're trying to eat cookies as a little kid.

Tommy: Oh my gosh. I know, and sometimes they'll grab a cookie at a different line, and that's great and that's fine. We play off each other and I kind of have to play this. It's like the cookies in my mouth. Yes, exactly. I think trying to really live in the experience of the memory, and to me, the most beautiful part of Emil's writing, Tyne's direction, Abby's book, and how it comes together on stage with the puppetry is that it allows memory to enter the present-day space. Because I think that's how memory functions. It functions in our present. It enters you.

I could be talking. I'm thinking about something that happened to me when I was four, and then I'm back at the table, and I'm like, "Sorry, what did you say?" That's what's happening to Chava this entire time.

Abby: I mean, I will just say like that for me, watching it, when you said five bodies working as one organism is so interesting because it's one of the many like Kabbalistic Jewish mystic things that they talk about. There's a mention to one of those sources in the play, a source from the Zohar, which is this 13th century core Kabbalistic Jewish mystic text that talks about every person having to be male and female at all times, but there's actually a lot more. Every person has somewhere between 7 to 10, at all times, different kind of almost personalities.

To me, it is one of those Kabbalistic things that I grew up with as this mystical thing that is actually very real to me in a day-to-day life. I feel like to this day, like I have all of those parts. Sometimes I am a very-- if we can use that word now, very sexual, 30-year-old living in New York City as a queer person and trying to live life. The next day, I'm giving a sermon in front of 1,500 people for our high holiday service. Another time, I am just this nerdy farming who is up in the Upstate New York doing some farming because I love doing that.

All of those different ideas coming together, and it's actually extremely liberating and beautiful to watch-- what isn't, but obviously isn't me, and I had to do a lot of work on being like, "This is Chava in the play, which based on me, not me." Doing all of that, but watching it has been so helpful in my own life, if I may say. It has been so liberating. I think I've mentioned, you might have heard me say this, Tommy. I've mentioned how-- I used to have this complicated relationship with pictures of me before transition, to the extent that I wouldn't share them.

I shared them once 10 years ago, and then I stopped. Now, with the puppetry, I'm like, "Oh, an old photo of me? Let's puppet me. That's not really me anymore." To the extent that now talking, just like on Sunday when I learned that my grandfather passed away, I think for the first time in 10 years, I actually shared two photos that are pre-transition me from my wedding for the first time in 10 years. 100%, that's my therapist, plus the play gave me the ability to have this, like, "This is me, but it's more of a puppet. It's not real me. It's not in there. There is still a lot growing in."

With the puppetry and Amanda, who made the puppets, and Rowan and having all these conversations, but one of the things that the puppets do is as it gets older, it becomes more corporal. It starts out more vague, like the body isn't so solid. As the puppet gets older, it becomes more and more real, and then there's all those moments where Tommy steps in for the puppet, the first time with a kiss, and then conversations with Freddie, with the ex, and so on. Those are all so real, because, yes, it's Chava, but it isn't. It is so much about growing into a way of feeling comfortable.

This was not the plan of this play in any way or form, but it has turned into-- I was expecting it just to be extremely traumatic for me, to be honest. It has turned into this thing where I found myself someday thinking, "Can I share these photos?" Because the only photos I have with my grandfather are pre-transition. I'm like, "Yes, I think I'm comfortable with this. It's not really me. This is puppets. This is puppet Abby." There's puppet Chava on stage. There's puppet Abby in photos. It's perfect. That makes me so happy.

Alison Stewart: I want to get to this before we run out of time, but Tommy, I want to know how it feels to perform in a play like this at this particular moment that we're in right now with trans folks.

Tommy: What's happening?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Tommy: What's happening in this moment?

Alison Stewart: What's happening for you?

Tommy: What's happening for me? It's been an incredibly vulnerable year of being an actor on a stage, in sharing physical space with hundreds and hundreds of people in a political climate that is actively threatening trans people's safety, serenity, peace. I mean, just on the basic, but I also think there's been violence perpetrated towards trans people since the beginning of time. Maybe not since the beginning of time, but in my contemporary life and in this nation. It's just being publicized, it's being platformed differently, it's being weaponized differently.

Obviously, that is a really complicated space to try and do anything in. It can be a hard space to wake up in, let alone go on stage and share a story, such a specific story about a trans experience with an audience. I think I remember feeling this really distinct shift in January, February. We all know why, when I was doing Romeo + Juliet, because I was the only trans person in that cast. There was a non-binary actor who was my understudy, but at least, company on stage, eight shows a week. Most of the time, I was also very scantily dressed.

It invites a certain type of investigation of body. Trans people-- I don't like inviting that type of investigation of body, but that's also part of the human experience, any actor's experience. It's not specific to being trans. It's just that there's another layer to that, especially when the country's talking so much about us in this negative, deeply violent, violating way, it can be really complicated to somehow move through that, feel safe enough to do my work, which requires me to feel completely unburdened, and so I can be as present as possible, and I'm not worried about the violence that people are wanting to engage with, with me on stage.

Becoming Eve is-- I feel great because I had this experience with Romeo + Juliet where I kind of had to realize my body was protest in this moment, and then Becoming Eve is just like a continuation of my body as protest in this moment. Really, offering that to the people who get to show up and see it.

Alison Stewart: The play is called Becoming Eve. My guests have been Rabbi Abby Chava Stein and actor Tommy Dorfman. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Tommy: Thank you for having us.

Abby: Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.