Arielle Goldman in The Matriarchs. Photo: Valeria Terranova

There’s a subtle irony to using the title “matriarchs” to describe a group whom we first meet as a pack of thirteen-year-olds. The six girls who comprise the main ensemble (the seventh is a never-seen narrator) may be named after the women of the Old Testament (Rachel, Leah, Miriam, Sara, Zipporah, Rivkah), but—with the sometime exception of Sara—they have none of the solemnity of a matriarch. They’re still obsessed with weird-flavor gummy snacks and giant Ferrero Rocher truffles, even if they’ve technically arrived at womanhood by the standards of their modern Orthodox Jewish community. 

At the core of Liba Vaynberg’s The Matriarchs lie heartfelt, yearning questions about womanhood, female identity, and female friendship, seen through the specific lens of modern Orthodox Judaism but taking each character on an individual journey through faith, purpose, success, and how to navigate an adult relationship with the insular community that raised you while living in the wider world. On the one hand, the play’s strength is its anchor in that collective, that sense of shared roots. No character’s arc is separable from the whole: six girls from Teaneck, whose lives the play dips into at a Talmud study session just after their bat mitzvahs; on one of their wedding days when they are all together for the first time in many years; and a few years later when the group has atomized and we see them face separate, unexpected joys and sorrows. We get a portrait of the pressure to balance professional and domestic success, ambition and motherhood, as their lives spool out on six very different–but always intersecting–paths taken from their shared roots. 

On the other hand, the fact that we don’t go too deep with any of the characters means that those different paths can feel a little too self-consciously plotted for their disparity: those who leave their faith and those who stay; single and married; straight and gay; content and troubled. And the gaps between scenes and between thirteen and thirty-something mean that the evolution of these characters takes place offstage; the biggest event that occurs in the play itself is the spilling of hot beverages (twice, both on the same character’s lap). For some of them, it’s hard to see how they got from A to B in the interstices.

We begin with an offstage Voice (Rachel Botchan): Our Town’s Stage Manager on a god mic, with an expansive view of the girls’ presents and futures. She addresses a listener, a “you” outside this community, to set the scene: 4:29 pm (a time that will cycle through the piece), a winter Shabbas evening, a group of thirteen-year-old girls gathered at the home of Miriam for a study session. The lesson for today is on taking accountability for the kinds of damage we can cause to others. The strictures of Shabbas mean no phones, no computers, and modest clothing that doesn’t align with twenty-first-century fashion, so there’s a quiet timelessness to the scene.   

An epigraph in Vaynberg’s script tips to Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, with its famous opening scene set at a dreamlike dinner party of historical women. We’re in memory rather than history here, but as in Top Girls, this long first scene plays as prologue to the contemporary action at the play’s core. Cate McCrea’s set, anchoring the compact space on a large central table, also mirrors the setup, as does the relationship between these characters and their biblical analogues. Plot points draw on nominal attributes from the namesakes—Sara’s trouble conceiving; Miriam’s two younger brothers; Zipporah (Tzippi) performing her own son’s circumcision—almost as tendrils connecting to a story about the modern women these girls will become.  

The actors are all adults, and under Dina Vovsi’s direction we get their fizzy youthful energy, but they’re not particularly convincing as twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. (It becomes clear why, but for much of the first scene it’s a puzzling obstacle to understanding exactly when we are; I took them for older teenagers for much of this section.) There’s Miriam (Helen Cespedes), the host, introspective and eloquent; the play is as much in her memory as it is in real time. And we quickly learn that the narrator, with a view to the future of all the girls as she introduces them, is also, or sometimes, Miriam’s mother, Mrs. H. Sara (Anna O’Donoghue) is a pious know-it-all, a rule-follower par excellence who also wants credit for how well she’s exemplifying her role. Twins Rachel (Arielle Goldman) and Leah (Molly Carden) are polar opposites who torment each other even as they adore each other: Rachel a drama queen who glows under the spotlight of attention and Leah a twitchy bundle of awkwardness whose deep emotions course through her anxieties and dreams (literal dreams; she’s always telling the group about the elaborate narratives of her sleeping mind). Tzippi (Rebecca S’Manga Frank) is a motherless rabbi’s daughter, more focused on the luxe snacks and on trying-but-not-very-hard to avoid talking about Miriam’s brother than the lesson. And Rivkah (Frankie Placidi), poised and more self-contained than the others, is ever turning her analytic eye on the others. 

This first scene feels like a very patient, methodical way of defining the characters, setting the stage and hinting at their futures, but it also tends toward the static and portentous. (Thirteen-year-olds are dramatic and self-serious, of course, but more lightness and swiftness in the whole would have allowed more specific choices on moments to hit hard, and moved the play more dynamically toward the characters’ adulthood.)  Vaynberg is taking great care to do meticulous groundwork in constructing her characters and their cultural context, but Vovsi’s direction doesn’t always succeed in integrating the balance between their girlish enthusiasms and their Talmudic inquiries. The oscillation is sometimes intentionally uneasy, to be sure, but at other times it just feels jarring. Provocative lines of inquiry, about accountability and justifiable war, about interrogating the very premises on which their community is based, surge and drop, proposed but not engaged. 

It’s the middle scene, after the girls clear away their snack table and the space becomes a dressing room, where the core of the story lives, and where we can see the entire ensemble breathe and relax into their adult characters. It’s Zipporah’s wedding day; she’s marrying Miriam’s brother and Miriam, a rabbi, is presiding. Zipporah is a doctor and so is Leah, who’s also pregnant with her third son and handing out recreational drugs on the side. Sarah, an elementary schoolteacher, remains the most devout, covering her hair and still judging the others for their failures of faith (and judging Miriam for “making a statement” by becoming a rabbi instead of marrying one. Rachel is an actress, moderately unsuccessful and one foot out their door toward a fully secular life. But it’s Rivkah–now Rebecca–who’s moved the farthest: a married lesbian lawyer whom everyone is surprised to see here today. (This is nicely underscored by Johanna Pan’s costumes: Tzippi is in her wedding gown, of course, and Leah, Rachel, and Sarah are in dusky pink bridesmaid dresses of different modest cuts, with Rachel throwing on a funky tapestry coat when she goes out to smoke. Rebecca is in a black leather jacket.) 

In that negotiation between the first two scenes is where the play is strongest: What is the balance between the community into which you were born and the choices you’ve made in your life? Is there any earthly reward for faith? How do you navigate the journey into adulthood, and the relationships with the friends of your youth, while you’re all making different choices about how to relate to the strictures and structures imposed by your faith? 

The performances are the strongest here, too, even where the evolution from child to adult is least clear: Leah and Rachel seem to have switched places on the anxiety scale. Carden’s hunched, folded-in physicality as the teenage Leah has been replaced with an expansive, grounded comfort in her pregnant body; Goldman’s confident jumping on chairs for proclamations has become a restless, edgy energy that has one ear always poised for a phone call and one hand always reaching for a cigarette. We see more clearly how Miriam, Sara, and Rebecca have evolved: Cespedes’s inquisitive spirit settles into a combination of quiet authority around others and deep self-interrogation when alone. O’Donoghue’s Sara has become even surer in her ways on the surface to counter the deep grief she’s battling personally. And Placidi’s Rebecca radiates a deep confidence in the choices she’s made. (Frank’s Tzippi gets the least chance to shine here, as Tzippi’s mired in pre-wedding jitters and most of what we see of her character is anxiety, not helped by the other women’s skepticism of the marriage in the first place.)

But then the play shifts again, toward tragedy. In the final scene, Miriam is the anchor, as the women atomize into their separate lives, never to be all together again. As she dialogues with the Voice, we see time spool by: Sara wrangling with her marriage in the face of infertility; Leah and her husband getting a nanny and counseling to help with their growing family; Tzippi and Mo’s marriage failing; Rebecca becoming a parent and reengaging with her faith from a different direction. Only Rachel is missing–until we find out why, triggering a crisis of faith for Miriam as she grapples with how little meaning or desert there is in any of the outcomes. No one can be held accountable for the damages that occur in these women’s lives–is the journey from their youth meaningless after all?

The Voice has now moved fully away from any real-world anchor in Miriam’s mother; it’s internal, or it’s God–was “Mrs. H” for “Mrs. Hashem” all along? Vovsi and Vaynberg have made the distracting choice of having Miriam addressing the voice as if it’s coming literally from above and then going to physically look for it in the floor and an air vent; this sucks energy out of what should be a powerful final revelation. But it’s also hard to end the play with Miriam alone, collapsing into her younger self, when its strength was always in that collective. There’s power and joy, strength and wisdom,  in The Matriarchs, but the balance in its construction feels off.