Early on in the play, the rhythm and character writing carry the storytelling. I luxuriated in the familiar moments: young girls singing “David Melech” while doing the corresponding hand jive dance moves that I also learned when I was taught the song; fear of giving themselves a kina hora (evil eye curse); and their self-righteous gossip about their classmates, their family members, and one another. Vaynberg and director Dina Vovsi have assembled a brilliant cast of actors, each equally adept at conveying the sweetness and silliness of The Matriarchs alongside its darker and more complicated themes.  

Rachel Botchan plays a character simply styled as The Voice, an omniscient mother-creator whose presence is felt even when she is not actively speaking. She tells us exactly what will happen to each of the six girls before we officially meet them. The Voice is a divine framing device, just out of reach, just offstage. The logic of The Matriarchs seems to reveal that God is a woman because women create life. The characters of The Matriarchs interrogate the lot they’ve been given as religious figureheads as well as literal human beings who have been taught since birth that a life-giving is a woman’s duty. The reality, of course, is much more complicated. Vaynberg is incredibly smart about modernizing the plight of biblical women in ways that both deepen the modern counterpart-characters and humanize their canonical experiences. 

The Matriarchs really came to life for me in its second sequence, where The Voice shows us adult versions of Miriam, Sara, Rivkah, Rachel, Leah, and Tzipporah gathered on Tzippy’s wedding day. We witness the theory of adolescence become the practice of adulthood; all of the girls are more ultimate versions of their young selves. The unfailingly pious Sara is happily married, though unhappily struggling with her fertility; Rivkah, coming into her queerness, has left the modern orthodox community entirely. Miraculously, Vaynberg’s script balances respect and care for both Sara’s by-the-book, religious lifestyle and Rivkah’s queer, secular one, as well as the conflict it inspires between them. It is some of the most compelling drama in the play, shepherded along by O’Donoghue and Placidi’s grounded, loving performances. 

As the characters reap what their pasts have sown, and talk to each other about their problems, they’re able to grow, change, and mature. It is not institutional religion that saves these women as much as community; it is not faith that keeps them connected to Jewish identity as much as practicing and questioning. Vaynberg describes the play’s structure as “Talmudic” in her contextual notes at the beginning of the script, born of differing perspectives that make the parts of a whole even more valuable than the thing itself. 

Even as the characters’ lives branch out further, and in more disparate directions (the wedding, we’re told, is the last time all six characters are in the same room), they listen to each other and care for each other whenever they’re able. The Matriarchs imagines a universe where life’s unfairest moments can be made more tolerable through friendship, conversation, and understanding, and a liturgy that can be parsed and appreciated through stories in childhood and experience in adulthood.