“The Matriarchs” Recasts the Torah’s Women

Playwright (and frequent Lilith contributor) Liba Vaynberg’s work “reimagines canonical text by centering contemporary questions of gender, progress, and God (or lack thereof).” Her play, The Matriarchs, casts the ancillary women of the Torah as brilliant, voluble, endlessly opinionated participants in a women’s Talmud study group, chronicling their evolving relationships to faith, gender, and each other.

Developed with the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and investigative theater company The Civilians, The Matriarchs premieres at Theaterlab in a limited run produced by Anna & Kitty, Inc. – a non-profit co-founded by Vaynberg herself – beginning September 10. (Buy your ticket for September 18 and be treated to a talkback following the show with the playwright and Lilith contributors Sarah Seltzer and Rebecca Katz!) I caught Vaynberg after a day in the rehearsal room for this spirited interview.

I feel like you should start by talking about the initial seed of this play, particularly because – and this is a testament to your play – I imagine a lot of people will just assume that you grew up Modern Orthodox like your characters.

I’m the daughter of post-Soviet Jews, [who] are like the opposite of Modern Orthodox. [In] my family, Jewishness is deeply felt, deeply believed – and then they also drive to shul on shabbos and eat shrimp. It’s just like – in America, they have shrimp, so why wouldn’t we eat shrimp? And – we’re Jews, we were stoned for being Jews, we had it written in our passports – the idea that you could practice Judaism is both a privilege and also inconceivable to people who come from a culture where there was state-mandated atheism.

So the seed of this play really began when I started dating my now-husband. His closest friend from University of Chicago ran a Shabbos shiur – a lesson – in which she taught Talmud to her daughter, who was 13 at the time, and her friends. They would come over, learn together, snack together, and be in community together. I overheard this lesson – and most of the lesson was not Aramaic Talmud – it was the girls gossiping about their lives and using the Talmud to parse local issues like, “If Joey was on his way to my locker and tripped on the banana peel that I left there, what does that mean for the damages to my self-esteem and how much does he owe me?” and using the legalese of the Talmud to get involved in the business of Joeys and Joshes and Jonathans. This made me think two things: one, I’ve never seen this space inhabited by anyone other than male-identifying folks, and also – what is this project? Why do we care? I was thinking a lot about – why do mitzvahs [good deeds], why care about the Talmud, why care about Judaism? 

Let’s use an analogy: you go to soccer practice. You can be the kid who tries to score, or you can be the kid who’s like, why are we running around chasing a ball? It’s just a ball. On the other hand, we’re ascribing meaning to the ball and where it goes and creating a community called a team around it. And there is an element of Talmud and mitzvahs where I’m like – they don’t actually have to be that interesting in order for us to be able to create community around them that is actually interesting and matters. At the end of the day, it’s all just a soccer ball, and it becomes a question of: do you want to live a life where you care about it or a life where you don’t? So, that was the seed of it – listening to these girls and starting to spiral into the things they were spiraling into – and realizing I was really jealous of them and the fact that they’re going to grow up with these memories of learning on shabbos together.

And did you envision the girls as contemporary versions of the matriarchs early on?

I always thought of them as the backbone. My writing has always adhered to some skeleton that comes from outside of me. I wrote this play The Gett – it was seven scenes based on the seven days of creation and a play called Round Table about a man who’s dying and rehearsing his own death through LARP. It’s 12 scenes; each is one month of his life. This is a less fragmented play because it’s a memory play – but finding these women in the Torah that have always been somebody’s wife, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mistress, somebody’s sister – it was really exciting to me to imagine them in a liberated conversation where the men are just kind of like the Peanuts voice.

Yeah, there’s a husband, there’s a son, but they’re mentioned in passing, much the same way that, in the Torah, women are mentioned very briefly and then they’re dead, and they had seven kids or whatever.

Did you always know you wanted to explore fertility, too? Or was it the fertility issues baked into the Torah that inspired you?

It shouldn’t, but it becomes a kind of metaphor for your personhood, for creativity, for whether or not you will continue on in the great timeline of life. I got to the age where I had friends who were freezing their eggs and telling me crazy stories about doctors that wouldn’t take them because they would ruin their statistics when they wanted to do egg retrievals. I didn’t know that you pay even if they don’t retrieve any eggs. I became really mired in the politics of it as I watched my friends go through it. The number of women who have read this play and said, “I went through this. This is my story” – I realized, oh, it’s not just one woman’s story or one person’s story. It’s happening to a lot of people but there’s no forum to discuss it.

I’d love to hear about the research involved in developing the piece with The Civilians (an incubator that specializes in ‘investigative theater,’ a combination of a creative process with field research).

My husband once said that I’m like a magpie in my research – I take little bits of things that are useful from different areas and kind of mix them all together. This is a play about many voices. This is also a play about disagreement. If I get too stuck on one person’s perspective, I’m in trouble. With The Civilians, some of the research I was doing was on my own, like reading bits of the Bava Kamma and midrash about each individual matriarch. But I was also interviewing women who are Orthodox with different relationships to it, understanding their lived experiences. I actually want the disagreement. In the play, Sara and Rivkah disagree a lot. I want the Sara on one side who so deeply believes in traditional womanhood and the Rivkah on the other who rejects it. I want us to understand and love both of them. My husband and I like to say that, in good drama, everybody’s wrong and everybody’s right – actually wrong and actually right. If a person’s just right or just wrong – it’s commedia dell’arte or agitprop theater.

I’m curious how you think this play is in conversation with – or complicating, disrupting – the cultural moment we’ve been having around girlhood.

We are in the moment of girlhood plays. This play both leans into that expectation and – without too many spoilers – then rejects that. While I love girlhood – I seek to maintain my inner girl forever, though I do now think I am a woman (just barely) – I also think the fixation on girlhood leaves out the majority of our lives as older-than-girls. I want to tread very carefully around girlhood as a fixation or an obsession, as opposed to the beginning of an important story, or the beginning of the Russian doll of who we are, where we always have the girl inside us. It is beautiful to age, actually. It’s a privilege to age.

The Matriarchs runs September 10-28, 2025 at Theaterlab (357 West 36th St., 3rd Fl, New York, NY 10018). Lilith‘s Night at the Theater will feature a talkback with Sarah Seltzer and Rebecca Katz. Tickets here. 

Miranda Jackel (they/she) is a dramaturg, theatermaker, and arts writer in NYC. They are a member of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. @mirandakatejackel

Key art by Liana Finck.