|
|
Glaser shares 'Family Secrets'
ANNE BRADY
Associate Editor
And you thought your family was crazy?
Actress/writer Sherry Glaser will bring her one-woman show, "Family Secrets," to Phoenix Little Theatre, 100 E. McDowell Road, for two weekends, opening Sept. 17 and continuing through Sept. 27.
Glaser portrays five members of a dysfunctional Jewish family in this 100-minute dramatic comedy, which has made its way to Phoenix from San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and off-Broadway in New York City.
The characters, based on Glaser's own family, include: Mort, the retired accountant and sourpuss dad, disappointed because he spent $87,000 on his son's education only to have the son go to live on a kibbutz "with a harmonica and some sheep"; Fern, his oldest daughter, who renamed herself Kahari and had a lesbian love affair before getting pregnant by boyfriend Miguel, a "transchanneler"; Bev, Mort's wife, who had a nervous breakdown over a failed lasagna; Rose, the elderly family matriach; and bulimic teenager Sandra, who has been grounded after being caught with marijuana.
"Sandra is the teen-age part of me. Fern (who gives birth during the play) is the mother part," said Glaser, in a telephone interview from her home in Northern California, where she lives with her two children. "It (the play) definitely crosses cultural boundaries. Everybody's got crazy families to deal with.
"Sometimes the Jewish people get some of the jokes quicker. There's one joke where I don't even have to tell the punch line before some people get it. The family is from New York, so people from New York can relate, although once someone said to me, 'Your family reminds me a lot of a family I know in Arizona.' "
The play was co-written by Glaser and her husband Greg Howells, who directed it up until he mysteriously disappeared from a golf course in 1997.
"We were in Carmel, doing (her new show) 'Oh, My Goddess,' " she recalled. "He left his golf cart and his clubs on the 13th hole.
"We had a new baby, a 1-year-old, and (Howells) was directing the play. My father had just died a few months before that."
Glaser had been taking time off from "Family Secrets" after performing the work for six years, allowing other women to perform it with Howells directing, while she cared for her baby and wrote "Oh, My Goddess."
After her husband's disappearance, she went back to performing "Family Secrets," and she said she even finds it comforting in the sense that she feels closer to her father when portraying him in the Mort character.
"I was in terrible grief, and having to perform was difficult, but I had to support my family," she said. "After a year, something happens, an acceptance. I have more clarity now. I've survived."
Glaser is back on the road with both "Family Secrets" and "Oh, My Goddess."
"She still tours with 'Family Secrets' in cities where she hasn't appeared before, i.e. Phoenix," said Charles Lago of Authors on Tours Presents in San Diego, who is promoting Glaser's upcoming performance. "She may come back to Phoenix with 'Oh, My Goddess.' "
"Oh, My Goddess" follows the spiritual awakening of the deeply unconscious, addicted and deluded Miguel De Cervantes, who finds himself the unlikely channeler for the return of the great goddess, Ma, Jewish mother of us all.
Glaser also has written an autobiography called "Family Secrets," published by Simon & Schuster, and she said she has "a screenplay in the works. ... Things are happening."
Performances of "Family Secrets" will be Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $18, or $15 for seniors and groups. For more information and/or tickets, call the Phoenix Theatre box office, 254-2151.
|
