VIEW FROM THE EDGE

It's hard to imagine a Jewish schoolteacher from Milwaukee with the power to plunge the world into a nuclear war. But after seeing the William Gibson play "Golda's Balcony" (opening Wednesday on Broadway, following a successful Off-Broadway run), it's not only imaginable but credible.

Goldie Myerson, better known as Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, gave Henry Kissinger conniptions, to say nothing of what she gave her husband Morris. Meir had the will to launch Israel's then-secret "temple weapons" even if, as the sole means of defeating the combined Egyptian-Syrian suprise attacks of the Yom Kippur War, it would have meant the destruction of the temple itself.

"Such, such were the joys," as George Orwell put it in another context. If he felt, recalling his school days, that they were "peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey," he was wrong. Meir in her 70s at the moment of her greatest crisis -- surrounded by generals fearful that the Arabs would make good on their vow to throw the Jewish state into the sea -- had the same "sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness" as Orwell did, "of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them."

In the play, Meir puts it in her own, very different words as "the question that won't die." But it is the same question that Orwell asked all his life, that any benevolent leader grappling with a hostile world of good and evil must ask: "What happens when idealism becomes power?"

I don't mean to give the impression that "Golda's Balcony" is a play of ideas on the order, say, of "Copenhagen." Thank God, it's not -- though it doesn't hesitate to declare wisdom like this: "There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews." It's far more a human tale of confession -- a sentimental, occasionally hokey, one-woman show so gripping as a flesh-and-blood Broadway entertainment that it's almost embarrassing to admit it's an instance of Holocaust literature which, believe it or not, can make you laugh (not just cry).

I'll leave the official reviews to the critics. Whatever they say, though, I'm betting word-of-mouth raves will be unstoppable; "Golda's Balcony" will be a smash; and when Tony time comes around next June, Tovah Feldshuh will be nominated for her portrayal of Golda in a performance made of both steel and chicken soup.