When Abby Chava Stein, 33, stepped away from her ultra-Orthodox upbringing, she wasn’t just leaving behind her way of life and her family — she was stepping into her authentic self.
Now, the first openly transgender female rabbi from a Hasidic background takes center stage in “Becoming Eve,” a new play adapted from Stein’s 2019 bestselling memoir of the same name. The one-act, 110-minute New York Theater Workshop production, which opens off-Broadway on April 7, chronicles Stein’s journey from serving as a male Hasidic rabbi in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to becoming an outspoken transgender activist and writer.
The play, written by Emil Weinstein and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, offers a rare, intimate look into an insular world and the immense courage required to leave it behind. And while “Becoming Eve” was five years in the making, the play premieres at an especially fraught moment for members of the transgender community, as President Donald Trump and state legislatures take aim at trans rights.
For Weinstein — who is also trans and Jewish — the play’s arrival on the stage could not come at a time of greater urgency.
“We’re asking people to be uncomfortable in a way that also teaches them something new about the world — but hopefully, in a way that feels interesting and entertaining and exciting,” he said. “Especially because it’s coming out right now, it just feels like we need empathy, even if the experience is really hard to understand.”
Though “Becoming Eve” makes creative use of puppetry to portray earlier, pre-transition versions of Chava, the play hones in on one moment in Stein’s biography in particular: A morning in 2015 when Stein came out as female to her father, a prominent rabbi and descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.
In the semi-fictionalized telling, Stein — who is known as Chava in the play — uses rabbinical texts to reveal the historical presence of transgender individuals within Judaism to her disapproving father. Chava’s father responds with disgust and, in real life, Stein has not had contact with either of her parents since.
“This is not ‘Shtisel,’” Stein said, referring to the Israeli series about a haredi Orthodox family that became a Netflix hit. “This is not attempting to tell the lives of Hasidic people. This is telling a very specific moment that involves specific people with a lot of flashbacks happening in the community.”
Weinstein said he chose to focus on Stein’s coming out in order to highlight the authenticity and complexity of Stein’s journey, something he often felt is missing from mainstream portrayals of LGBTQ experiences.
“‘Becoming Eve’ felt like an opportunity to have an audience who maybe would never see a conversation like that, have to sit in a queer experience that is painful and universal but also ultra-specific,” Weinstein said. “It felt exciting that I could frame this in a real-time conversation while still telling her life story.”
Currently in previews, “Becoming Eve,” will run at the Abrons Arts Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side through April 27. Initially intended to run at The Connelly Theater in the East Village, the production had to relocate after objections from the theater’s landlord, the Archdiocese of New York, regarding its themes of gender. Though the incident delayed the production, the creative team found new meaning in Abrons, one of the first homes for Yiddish theater in the United States in the early 20th century.
“It feels like a huge gift that we got to have it on the Lower East Side, where so many of our ancestors came when they first came to this country,” Weinstein said. “The play takes place in this sort of community room and synagogue and Abrons just feels like that. So it felt really special and kismet.”
Despite growing up in vastly different Jewish worlds, Weinstein found a “kindred spirit” in Stein.
“I’m a Jewish trans person, so on an extremely personal level, this is a story that I really wanted to be a part of telling,” he said. “But also, I’m really interested in Jewish mysticism and philosophy. I love Torah study, and so much of Abby’s story is how she found a way to be trans and Jewish in the text. And to me that was so inspiring.”
Tommy Dorfman, the transgender and Jewish actress who portrays Chava, felt a similar connection to Stein. (The cast also includes Tedra Millan and Brandon Uranowitz, two Jewish stars of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” which was staged on Broadway in 2022.)
“It felt like a perfect opportunity to explore the complexities of being a trans woman, and being Jewish and reclaiming identity and faith for yourself,” Dorfman said. “I remember reading the play and feeling so much love in it. That felt important to me.”
Those feelings were important to Stein, too, who has been deeply involved in her book’s transition to the stage. She said it was integral that the people behind and in the show were trans and Jewish — otherwise, she said, the story would lack authenticity and would not come across as based in lived experiences.
“I have seen things about trans people written by non-trans people. They all suck,” said Stein, who last year became a part-time rabbi at Kolot Chayeinu, a progressive synagogue in Park Slope. “From a creative point of view, from an artistic point of view, authenticity objectively creates better art. It objectively creates better stories.”
In some ways, it’s just another example in which the ways trans and Jewish stories collide, Weinstein added. “One of the pitches of the play is transness and Jewishness are indelibly linked, and that there’s a need for, especially Jewish folks, to understand that transness is part of our history, part of our lineage,” Weinstein said, pointing to a Ukrainian shtetl in the 19th century that accepted a transgender man, and that the Talmud, the massive compendium of Jewish legal traditions, acknowledges seven gender designations.
While Stein acknowledges it can feel a bit strange knowing that a show inspired by her life will be seen as fact by many in the audience — “I’ve had a lot of conversations with my therapist about how to deal with it,” she quipped — she’s a firm believer in the power of storytelling to combat hate.
“Storytelling is the strongest tool that we have,” she said. “We can have theological arguments, philosophical arguments and political arguments around trans rights. The thing that ultimately changes the most minds are personal stories.”
Currently in previews, “Becoming Eve” opens Monday, April 7, and runs through April 27 at Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand St.) on the Lower East Side. For tickets and more info, click here.
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