THEATER REVIEW : Moving Look at Life in ‘Family Secrets’

Why would anyone want to watch some strange woman giving birth? Because Sherry Glaser turns the experience into an exhilarating little drama that is hilarious, agonizing and moving, often all at once. Glaser returns to Los Angeles with her one-woman show, “Family Secrets,” through March 12 at the Henry Fonda Theatre.

The woman in labor is Fern, the daughter of a Jewish accountant. Fern has rewritten her identity to become Kahari, earth sister and sometime lesbian, whose idea of achieving full womanhood would be to menstruate freely in a hut. She is one of five members of the Fisher family that Glaser portrays in this compassionate and very funny evening of love, hate and Gestalt.

It’s impossible to describe the writhing that leads to perhaps the evening’s single funniest moment--Fern, exhausted from pushing, tired of squatting, sick of encouragement, screams at her baby with all her might, “GET OUT!”

That moment epitomizes how Glaser handles the often treacly subject of parents’ relationships to their children: With dead-on honesty. She lets us see the wonder as well as the horror and is never so trite as to suggest they always coexist.

In the midst of all their troubles, Glaser’s characters remain appealingly wry. Humor is a Fisher family trait, as is the slight lisp that Glaser brings to each character, even as she distinguishes them physically. Changing costumes on stage, she transforms herself from a weary, 60-ish dad, to his ditzy but philosophical wife, to their child-bearing daughter, to her heavy-metal loving teen-age sister, to an elderly grandmother, who shrinks a number of inches right before our eyes.

The evening starts on an understated note, with patriarch/accountant Mort, a man who may have been pragmatic from birth. Counseling Fern on the phone, Mort carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. He asks his wayward daughter a question so obvious he can’t believe he’s asking it: “Why did you write the checks when the money wasn’t there?” To Mort, his rather ordinary troubles are Job-like: His son is living on a Kibbutz--”I spent $87,000 on his education, and he’s on a hillside with a harmonica and some sheep.”

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Fern/Kahari is obviously a handful. On the phone she informs Mort that she is pregnant by a man who lists his occupation as trans-channeler. “The universe will provide,” she tells her father. Mort turns to us: “Let me show you the universe,” he says, reaching in his pocket for his wallet.

Mort’s wife, Bev, is a perfect ‘50s housewife who produces three children in Long Island. She waits until the ‘60s to have her breakdown, when Mort has a good job with major medical. The breakdown occurs one day when her children refuse to eat the lasagna she has just spend 3 1/2 hours preparing.

After hospitalization, Bev eventually finds therapy, lithium and finally an understanding for her own mother, whose mental illness took her from the family when Bev was 4. “The only way I could get to know my mother was to go crazy,” she says with her trademark cackle. Bev is a seemingly ordinary woman who has a superb appreciation of the humor and irony in all of life’s tragedy.

Sandra, the alienated 16-year-old, of course can’t see what she could possibly have in common with her monstrous parents. But Rose, the widowed grandmother who gets remarried in her 80s, looks at all of her children and grandchildren gathered together for her wedding, and notes that “I could see a little schmutz of me in all of them.”

When we finally meet Fern/Kahari, we can see her through the eyes of the other members of the family and as she sees herself. In the manner of Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” “Family Secrets” reveals how each individual is connected to a continuum, whether he or she likes it or not.

When Kahari achieves her ambition of becoming a true earth goddess, she is holding her newborn daughter, watching as the midwife clears the baby’s throat. “And she took her first breath,” says Kahari, stunned. Here, as in many, far more common moments, Glaser shows that the extraordinary is always lurking in the ordinary, if you can see life that way. Helping us see life that way is the great gift of “Family Secrets.”

* “Family Secrets,” Henry Fonda Theatre, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends March 12. $30-$35. (213) 365-3500 or (213) 468-1700 or (213) 468-1770. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

James L. Nederlander presents the David Stone, Irene Pinn, Amy Nederlander-Case production in association with Harriet Newman Leve. Written by Sherry Glaser and Greg Howells. Directed by Greg Howells. Sets by Rob Odorisio. Lights by Brian MacDevitt. Production stage manager Pamela Edington.