Tovah Feldshuh’s first character is a former anorexic who suffered through a marriage to a man who never expressed concern about her weight loss but often criticized her looks.
In the same vein as Love, Loss, and What I Wore—but with a different theme—My First Ex-Husband features a rotating cast of female celebrities performing monologues based on real-life stories. The initial four-person cast includes The View’s Joy Behar, who created My First Ex-Husband. At the top of the show, Behar explains that out of curiosity she started asking divorcées she knows about the reasons behind their breakups.
Adrienne C. Moore portrays two different women whose husbands were unfaithful.
For the stories Behar has chosen to present, the question really should have been “Why did you ever marry him?” One of the first lines in the first piece (read by Susie Essman) is “Fundamentally, we were opposites.” The next person to share her story (portrayed by Tovah Feldshuh) says, “He wasn’t very nice to me.” Another woman (Adrienne C. Moore) opens with “I was on my way to the honeymoon, and I was thinking, ‘How am I gonna get out of this?’”
All told, the eight monologues don’t shed much light on why a marriage might lose its sparkle, start to bore or frustrate the people in it, or implode. In nearly all of them, only a small portion deals with someone deciding they want out of a marriage or the process of going through a divorce. Mostly they’re about being married to a guy with a massive quirk—he wants to live off the grid, he likes to wear women’s clothes, he’s in the Mob—that eventually becomes intolerable.
Susie Essman costars in friend and fellow stand-up Joy Behar’s My First Ex-Husband. Photographs by Joan Marcus
There’s no heartbreak in these tales, and they’re generally relayed without poignance or “serious” emotion—Behar has scripted them for maximum laughs. So audience members may crack up at one woman’s saga of toughing it out in the wilderness cabin where her now ex-husband insisted on living in the early years of their marriage. And they may be enjoying Feldshuh’s delivery of the piece called “Wigged Out” too much to bother noticing it’s about marriage rituals and other customs of the Hasidim rather than the circumstances of her divorce—which isn’t even mentioned until the last couple of lines. (Yiddish-inflected characterizations are in Feldshuh’s wheelhouse, after all.)
That selection, as well as others in My First Ex-Husband, deals with issues that have driven the plots of multiple movies and TV series—Unorthodox, Married to the Mob, Transparent, to name a few—so the material isn’t particularly fresh. The play feels out-of-date, or at least senior-skewing, because of other factors, too: creaky pop culture references, an old-fashioned style of humor heavily dependent on one-liners, characters who don’t seem to use cellphones but do have cameras and cassette tape players, and an archaic understanding of gender identity—the narrator of My First Ex-Husband’s “Clothes Make the Man” doesn’t see her spouse as trans, even after her ex begins dressing and living as a woman publicly all the time, because “he hasn’t had any kind of surgery.”
Joy Behar tells one story by a woman who got romantically involved with a girlfriend while her husband was away, and another about a woman married 30 years whose husband still wants to have sex every night.
Behar, who’s 82, has said she interviewed her friends for the play. But the 90-minute show would be more interesting, less trite, if it included women of different generations (not only from the era when women were pressured to stay married), women who got divorced at different ages, whose lives headed in various directions after a divorce, or if the stories represented a range of reactions to splitting up. This could have produced a panorama of divorce experiences, not just a handful of monologues about being married to a weirdo/jerk.
What My First Ex-Husband has going for it is its cast, all expert comedians or actors, who deploy their comic timing, dramatic flair, onstage personality or a combination thereof to uplift the material. Not surprisingly, Feldshuh—a favorite on New York stages for more than 50 years—steals the show. Essman tamps down her Curb Your Enthusiasm ferocity for a more humane portrayal of exasperation; Behar puts her familiar sarcastic delivery to use; and Moore endears in a way the dud husbands she speaks of never could.
As in the long-running Love, Loss, and What I Wore—as well as The Vagina Monologues, another female-created and -performed work developed from interviews—cast members, dressed in black outfits, read from their scripts at lecterns on an otherwise scenery-less set. No set, lighting, costume or sound designers are credited for My First Ex-Husband, just a “costume consultant,” Olivera Gajic.
Future casts, like the current one, will feature a mix of theater veterans, screen stars and stand-up comedians; Tonya Pinkins, Jackie Hoffman, Veanne Cox, Susan Lucci and Gina Gershon are some of the actors set to join the show after Feb. 25.
My First Ex-Husband runs through April 20 at MMAC (Manhattan Movement & Arts Center, 248 W. 60th St.) Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday and at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Thursday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday; myfirstexhusband.com.
Playwright: Joy Behar
Director: Randal Myler
