Tovah Feldshuh shares marriage advice — as she prepares for a play about divorce

By Samuel Eli Shepherd
January 29, 2025

Joy Behar’s My First Ex-Husband, a new Off-Broadway series of comedic monologues about women in failed relationships, features a scene about a Hasidic woman who dreads her upcoming arranged marriage. The irony is, the actress playing the young, Hasidic bride-to-be Rebecca, Broadway legend Tovah Feldshuh, has been happily married for nearly half a century.

In the monologue “Wigged Out,” Rebecca describes her ideal husband as someone who lets her read English books, allows her to travel and does not attempt to control her life with wigs and demands. Rebecca yearns for a relationship outside the norms of her strict Haredi upbringing in Williamsburg, where marriage for women means, “You hardly ever see each other, but you have to be there for procreation and to raise the babies.”

Speaking on Zoom, Feldshuh said she can’t relate to many aspects of her character’s life. She grew up in a more secular Jewish community in Scarsdale. At 18, her character Rebecca is on the cusp of marrying a 23-year-old man: someone who Rebecca says is already “over the hill” in terms of an acceptable age. When Feldshuh was 18, she was at Sarah Lawrence College studying philosophy, and she was commuting into the city for acting classes with Uta Hagen.

Feldshuh discussed how despite all this, she still found some surprising commonalities between her and her character, Rebecca. She also shared — perhaps overshared — some of the tips she learned from her decades-long marriage to attorney Andrew Harris Levy.

Hopeless Jewish romantics and wannabe spouses, take note! Tovah is talking.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

SAMUEL ELI SHEPHERD: From Rosie Brice in Funny Girl to Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony, you’ve played a lot of Jews in New York City theater. But mostly secular Jews. Did you learn anything about the Hasidic community when preparing for this role?

TOVAH FELDSHUH: Well, I started to learn about the Haredi community in Yentl. That was my first marquee. It was at the O’Neill Theater on Broadway. I was snuck into a boy’s yeshiva in Borough Park by the great [Orthodox rabbi] Aryeh Kaplan. I wore his wife’s sheitel, so I could look like a modern Orthodox Jewish boy, and not Hasidish, because I didn’t know enough yet.

I remember wearing his son’s clothing, and I remember wearing gloves, so I wouldn’t touch any of those boys, because that would violate their code of ethics. I went twice.

I just couldn’t get over it! The verve. I find it marvellously Jewish. The whole idea of, ‘living in a question.’ It was very interesting.

When I studied the women back with Yentl, and when I studied this character, at least for me, I felt the tremendous oppression of women. They’re really oppressed. They’re put in a narrow venue — it has to do with being a balabusta, and being an executive in the home, and bringing new life into the world, and director of a household and sometimes even a business.

But in general, it’s a narrower life than I would ever entertain for myself.

Despite your different backgrounds, were there some aspects of Rebecca’s character or story that you connected with?

My job as an actor is to seek out those cellular coincidences.  She lives in Williamsburg, and my daughter Amanda, who’s about to give birth to our fifth grandchild, lives in Williamsburg. The guy who walks in to meet her has blond hair, and the two children of Amanda and Joel are blond-haired.

So you keep looking for images in your own life that trigger a richness of experience that gets portrayed through language, so that the entire monologue is experiential for the actor, and so it’s experiential for the audience.

Also, there were values handed down in my family that were very clear, about who has prospects and who would be a good husband. My father was a Harvard lawyer. My husband, Andrew Harris Levy, is a Harvard lawyer. Freud would have to do no work on my marriage to Andrew Harris Levy!

From your experience, what do you think makes a good marriage last?

My mother said, “If you love a boy, and the boy loves you back, don’t walk, run, to his parents’ home. If it doesn’t feel like a warm bath, it’s a red flag.” So I suggest to women getting married, exotic is cute for a while, then you have a lot of adjusting to do, and you better get ready to do it.

Number one: The greatest friend to a long marriage is cellular coincidence. Andrew’s mother was a classical pianist. My mother was a classical pianist. I, Tovah Feldshuh Levy, before I was an actor, I was a classical pianist. And so Andy and I were brought up with the same music, and that’s your clearest metaphor.

Number two: Do not leave the field of play. Every marriage goes through hiccups. Every intimate relationship eventually hits a rock. And all you have to do is lift up the stone or the rock with your partner and move it to the left. Or take what doesn’t work in a marriage, make it a small piece of the pie, and take what does work, and make it big.

Has this play changed the way you look at divorce? Any advice on that?

Marry like a Jew, divorce like a Catholic. Once there are children, I don’t believe in divorce. I really don’t, unless there’s some disaster. The big pillars: drugs, betrayal, alcoholism, God forbid, bodily punishment. But make no mistake. There is no shortcut around divorce with children.

Andy and I have stayed together through thick and thick. There hasn’t been a thin. I remember I was young, married for seven years. We disagreed on something and I realized we were never going to agree on it. Never! So I had to make a choice. Am I going to live with this contradiction, or is this going to be a big deal? I said I was going to live with the contradiction.

What do you hope that audiences—married, divorced, or single—might take away from seeing My First Ex-Husband Off-Broadway?

I hope the audience will take away the idea of choice.  It’s a comedy based on our place as women in relationship to the men we chose and how those men made us feel. They will either have insight into their own working or non-working relationships, or they will have access to small moments in each monologue of, “Oh my God. This happened to me! That’s something I can relate to.”

Tovah Feldshuh is playing in My First Ex-Husband  from Jan. 29 to Feb. 23 at the MMAC Theater.