The stage comeback of brassy media wit Joy Behar has pretty much come and gone, but the happy remnants of it are still at the MMAC Theater, an out-of-the-way theater at 248 W 60th.
Behar—one of founding voices of the long running ABC talk show The View (28 years and counting)—spent most of February polishing a play of eight monologues she crafted from interviews with a diverse group of divorcees. Then she performed it with Tovah Feldshuh, Susie Essman and Adrienne C. Moore.
Her second husband, Steve Janowitz, christened the show My First Ex-Husband. “I’ve only had two,” Behar tells Observer. “This one, I guess we’ll keep, so he won’t be my second ex-husband.”
Tony winner Tonya Pinkins, Oscar nominee Cathy Moriarty and Emmy winners Susan Lucci and Judy Gold are currently holding forth with the same material through March 23. Then Talia Balsam, Veanne Cox, Jackie Hoffman and Andrea Navedo will get their shots March 26-April 20.
Behar knew the rotating cast format from her turns in The Vagina Monologues and Love, Loss, and What I Wore — “back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth,” she quips. “I thought it great: You just keep changing the cast,” Behar says. “You don’t have to memorize anything because you’re reading other people’s stories. It just seemed like a good idea we could, and should, try again.”
The play started small, like a conversation. “Ten or so years ago—maybe more—one of my close friends gave me her time and told me what led to her divorce,” Behar recalled.
“I kept interviewing other women because I thought it was so human and so interesting. I would take hours of material and add some jokes here and there and turn that into a piece of theater. Beyond those eight monologues, I have in my stash four other ones I have to work on because they didn’t give me enough the first time around. I still have to add, subtract and fix.”
Although the subject matter remains the same—how one careens toward divorce—getting there varies quite a bit. “Each one of these monologues is different,” Behar beams. “They do not overlap. Of course, there’s always adultery in a divorce so that kinda overlaps, but you also get someone who’s married to the mob, or another one who has an oversexed husband. Every one of them has a husband who has a fetish. Each one of them is different. Show me something that’s different, and I’d be interested in putting it in the show.”
Every once in a while, there are shouts at the stage from members of the audience. “Most people are used to the fourth wall so they don’t usually choose to speak out,” Behar notes. “When I was on stage—because I have 30 or 40 years under my belt as a stand-up comic—it was easy for me to engage the audience. I encourage them to interact with me. I like that a lot.”
Behar doesn’t waste any time getting the ball rolling. Her first question to the audience is “How many of you have been divorced?” Her next is “How many of you would like to be divorced?”
Often, to the audience’s amusement, there are more hands showing in the second question than the first. This is followed by the sobering statistic of how many marriages end in divorce.
My First Ex-Husband is, yes, slanted toward the female—but that’s not exactly Behar’s fault. She did try to interview men on the subject. “But they gave me nothing,” she says. “They would have one-word answers or something like ‘She was crazy.’ They didn’t give me a story. Half these guys didn’t have a cue why they got divorced. Women loved to give me their stories.”
Nevertheless, the male of the species seems to be pretty thick-skinned about her findings. “I did make it a point sometimes to ask the men after the show, ‘Did you feel this was male-bashing?” And not one of them said it was. They said, ‘I don’t think so. I’m not like that.”
