Judy Gold: 6-foot-3, conservative Kosher Jew, gay, award-winning comedienne, and mother of two boys. Not your typical Jewish mother, eh?
Her many jokes about the sterotype, her struggle with her own identity, as well as the neurosis of her mother ("I love my mother but I don't want to become her!") spurred her quest to find out what makes a Jewish mother different from a non-Jewish mother. Scanning the United States for five years, she interviewed over 50 Jewish women, of different ages, occupations and ethnicities, ranging from non-practicing to ultra-orthodox to "confused", from Holocaust survivors to converts. The questions ranged from reflective ("How are you like and not like your mother?"), to droll ("Who do Jewish little girls get to look up to?") to deeply personal ("What is God to you?") The result is "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother," a hilarious and often poignant look at the mother-daughter bond, Jewish culture and what makes a Jewish mother, well, a Jewish mother.
The direction by Karen Kohlhaas is effective; Gold bounces between three places on the set, seamlessly weaving together her own life and the lessons she learned from her subjects. At the mic stand she puts on her comic face, offering up a few signature jokes from her comedy routine and imagining her mother in another life as a comic. Upstage, sans mic, she intimately gabs with the audience about the battle of wills between her and her mother, her escaping into Barbra Streisand soundtracks and Judy Blume books, her relationship with her partner Wendy and the kinds of values she wants to impart onto her children. There is no shortage of comedy; her schtick is sharp and witty, her anecdotes entertaining and sincere.
But it is in the corner chair where, in Vagina Monologues fashion, she channels a variety of women she interviewed. During these sequences you suddenly realize that Gold has untapped talent as a dramatic actress as she captures the facets of each character, complete with accent, posture, her own history and her own personality - real women with real emotions, real fears and real desires. And what fascinating women they are! From the Asian convert who misses the cultural familiarity of San Francisco to the Orthodox mother who learns to deal with her daughter marrying a non-Jew to the Holocaust survivor who watched her mother labor in the camps, these moments achieve a truly human balance amidst all the laughter.
Through humor and pathos Gold expresses how she was changed because of the women she interviewed – geez, if one woman could survive the concentration camp she could certainly find the courage to land on her feet after after a divorce. And, ultimately, she came to better understand Jewish mothers, particularly her own mother, who endured her own tragedy. Even if you're not Jewish it's easy to appreciate the humor and pathos in this show, because, well, everyone has a mother, everyone desires acceptance and everyone has their own destiny in life that must be followed.
At the St. Luke's Theatre, 308 West 46th Street.
