" No wigs, no swollen leg, no false nose — use your imagination, " instructs Annette Miller as she strides barefoot into the 99-seat theater as herself. She proceeds to don sensible shoes, hoist a large purse, thrust her head forward, take on a Yiddish accent, and transform in an instant into tough-talking Israeli prime minister (1969-1974) Golda Meir, who juggles the 1973 crisis of the Yom Kippur War with the story of her life. Outside the windows of the Victorian parlor in the Spring Lawn manse at Shakespeare & Company, it looks a lot leafier than Israel, but that doesn’t stop Miller from settling into Golda’s Balcony, 88-year-old playwright William Gibson’s new one-woman work, which will play in repertory throughout the summer.

Gibson is no newcomer to Meir, whose story he first told in the 1977 Golda. The Broadway production, which reunited the playwright’s Miracle Worker team of star Anne Bancroft and director Arthur Penn, was plagued by so many difficulties that Gibson wrote a war story about it, Notes on How To Turn a Phoenix into Ashes. Among the problems: Meir, who had at first approved the play, hated Bancroft’s performance, deeming it " too old, feeble, stooped, limping, tearful, and shuffly, " not to mention " too yiddishe-mama. " No surprise that the criticism, coming after troubled tryouts, paralyzed Bancroft, causing her to mute her performance. Then she got sick. The show lasted longer than the Six-Day War but not much longer.

There have been some changes since Golda. Meir is no longer around to play critic. Gibson, in turning the unwieldy earlier work into a muscular one-woman show, has written a better, more focused play with a chilling trajectory related to the title. " Golda’s balcony, " Meir tells us, was a nickname for the observation post from which she frequently viewed Israel’s secret underground facility for the creation of nuclear weapons, which was buried in a desert of broken rock at a place called Dimona. And Miller is giving a fierce performance that is none of the things to which its subject objected. Rather, her sinewy Meir, looking nothing like the real one, is a passionate, fanatical force, articulate enough to stand with one hand on her heart and the other on the explode button and ask the difficult question " What happens when idealism becomes power? "

That Gibson’s play, which has been in development for the last year, is more grimly timely than was looked for hardly needs mentioning. And those seeking a judicious exploration of the Arab-Israeli impasse will have to keep in mind that this is a play whose only mouthpiece is Golda Meir. As history attests, she is a formidable lady who devoted more than 50 years to the creation and protection of a Jewish state and who in 1973 was evidently prepared to use " the temple weapons " (as nuclear warheads were code-named) rather than " preside over its destruction. " The only hint of the Palestinian position comes in a flashback to a visit by Meir to Jordan’s King Abdullah following the United Nations vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Here she is made to understand that the partition would transform the Jews, in the mind of the Arab world, from Semites into " invaders. "

Golda’s Balcony suffers some of the strains of the one-person play. But Israeli-born, Boston-based director Daniel Gidron moves Miller fluidly about the small space that’s anchored by a personal chair and an official one, the walls papered with maps of the world, with Israel in a gilded frame. And he does a craftsmanly job of melding the prime minister’s stories of her life with the long night during which she awaits confirmation that the United States, sensitive to Cold War antagonism and dragging its feet, will send planes. All of which, as she puts it, boils down to the blood at the bottom of the pot in which she famously made chicken soup for her soldiers. As Gibson writes her, and Miller plays her, Meir is piercingly direct: " Two peoples and one piece of land, " she sums up the still ineradicable problem in the Middle East. " And they thought they’d seen the back of us. "

But the reason to see Golda’s Balcony is Miller, an intelligent actress who is giving the performance of her career as the pioneering Meir, here a pacing if slightly limping tiger. As related in the play, Meir escaped the pogroms of turn-of-the-century Russia, became a Zionist in Milwaukee, and emigrated to Palestine with her husband in 1921. At painful familial cost, she became part of the inner circle that forged the nation. Israel, she tells her left-behind husband, " is a necessity to me. " The performance captures that heartfelt, compulsive zeal. It’s there in Miller’s eyes, which sometimes burn hot enough to cook the chicken soup themselves.