Mon. Dec. 31

Last call! Judy Gold was – is – a standup comic who spent parts of five years with playwright Kate Moria Ryan crisscrossing the country, interviewing Jewish mothers of various ages and backgrounds. Gold – six foot three and a lesbian (facts she points out a dozen or so times in her show at the Calderwood Pavilion) – wanted to a) see how she herself differed from “the Jewish mother” (or stereotypes thereof) and particularly her own mother and b) put together material for a one-woman play. That play is “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” which won a 2006 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance and the 2007 GLAAD Award for Outstanding New York Theater production. Many successful comics – think Jackie Mason or Eddie Izzard – like doing one-person acts that take them out of the standard comedy clubs and into theaters, and also give them more room to roam theatrically. For Gold, this means she can be funny as all get-out. She posits that the pushy-but-guilt inducing Jewish mother would be the ideal drug dealer. She does it in the voice of her own mother, Ruth, had her own mother pursued standup comedy:  “Oh my back! I've been cooking up this crystal meth on the stove all day and you won't even touch it!" or “I cut the heroin nice and thin. with the baby powder, the way you like it.” But her play is not all comedy. In it, she uses 12 of those 25 questions and plays the characters of whom the questions are asked, seated in an easy chair under different lighting, which makes for a marked transformation. She interviews professionals, Reform Jews, Orthodox Jews. She finds one mother who sits shiva when she finds out a child has married a non-Jew. She talks about how she has become more kosher over time – even while defending a delicious cheeseburger – and how important passing on Jewish culture to her two sons is. She also tries to figure out which ones to pass on besides, of course, OCD and guilt.

Gold’s real life (some parts possibly exaggerated for comic effect) and her work over the years interviewing these women are interwoven. Gold deftly moves in and out of characters, addressing us as a comic (or non-comic) narrator and telling the tales the women told her about how being a Jewish mother is a unique experience. If you’re wondering how the Holocaust fits in, let’s just say it makes an appearance here and there and the stories Gold’s women tell bring the laughing audience to a hush.
Gold, a former producer for “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” talks about her struggle as an anomaly – the primary one being a Jewish female comic – you can add in her towering height and lesbianism if you like. She talks about how she and her longtime partner Wendy struggled to have children – they each bore one – and her mother’s reaction to the events. (Denial.) Her mother – demanding, whiny, anxious and possessive – takes a lot of comedic hits in this 80-minute production, (One criticism is there is a lot of whininess in these moms; my Jewish wife felt Gold played up too many stereotypes.) But there comes a moment near the end when you realize why all this has built up in  her over the years, and why some of it has been passed on to Judith.  (Her mother calls her – sometimes 12 times a day – Judith, never Judy.)
And, Gold says, there’s the one question every Jewish child seems destined to ask her mother: “Why do they hate us so much?” This weave – poignant, overblown, hysterical, whimsical – is quite effective and Gold never wears out her welcome. As the show is drawing to a close, you wonder where Gold will leave us after all this. We don’t want to give that away, but it comes as a shock … even if, at the very end, Gold comes to accept that, as much as she thought she was different from all the other Jewish mothers out there, “I am out as a Jewish mother.” The show winds up at the Calderwood Pavilion with a New Year’s Eve show at 8 closing the run.  Tickets: $50-$15.

527 Tremont St., 617-266-0800 www.huntingtontheatre.org