Mamme’s the word in funny, big-hearted WJT production

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This article was published 18/11/2021 (1450 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Q: What’s the difference between Jewish mothers and Italian mothers?

A: An Italian mother says, “Eat your dinner, or I’ll kill you.” A Jewish mother says, “Eat your dinner, or I’ll kill myself.”

The Catskills comedians of the ‘50s and ‘60s popularized jokes like this, but there have probably been Jewish mother jokes as long as there have been Jewish mothers. And at the core of these long-standing stereotypes of the overbearing matriarch — those nagging, neurotic, over-protective, supreme queens of guilt-tripping — is some kernel of truth.

Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s season opener, 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, delivers plenty of punchlines, but it’s also out to divine what makes Jewish motherhood distinctive… and what makes it universal.

The comedy with a sprinkling of tears — which was performed live Monday at the Tarbut Festival of Jewish Culture and is available online until Nov. 28 — is a canny choice for an at-home streaming audience. It’s a stripped-down 80-minute affair that might appear overly static in the theatre but that benefits from the dynamism provided by camera movement.

The original production is a one-woman show; WJT’s version is cleverly modified to include 10 real-life local Jewish mothers, while Toronto actor Diane Flacks plays the 10 other characters who answer the questions originally posed by American comedian Judy Gold to more than 50 American Jewish moms.

Director Krista Jackson seats the ensemble cast around a long table, set with a mish-mash of coffee cups and centred with a loaf of challah, braided egg bread. Their laughter and murmurs of recognition give the feel of being among an audience as the charming Flacks deftly leads the proceedings with a performance that blends standup and memoir with the portrayals, some subtle, some broad, of a stream of proud, conflicted, devout, worried mamas.

A few of the stage moms are familiar theatrical faces: performers Mariam Bernstein, Terri Cherniack, Debbie Maslowsky, Rochelle Kives and Amy Lee, and playwright Primrose Madayag Knazan. Others have strong ties to the Jewish community and the arts: Gail Asper, Karla Berbrayer, Jessica Cogan and Miriam Kohn.

Each mother reads her answer in the form of a short monologue printed on a card, and the women reading are as diverse as the women interviewed, who range from homemakers and social workers to judges and performers, from non-practising to Orthodox, from Filipina convert to Holocaust survivor.

The Holocaust looms large over 25 Questions; it doesn’t take a psychology degree to work out that the descendants of people who saw the branches of their family trees viciously pruned would be prone to anxiety and protective to a fault.

As such, some of the women’s answers resonate with deeply felt sentiment. It would be nice if those moments were allowed to land before being defused by a joke, especially when some of those one-liners are relatively hamfisted — the script, by Gold and playwright Kate Moira Ryan, perhaps veers too frequently into tired standup tropes. (That said, Maslowsky’s delivery of a classic Jewish-mother joke is pure Borscht Belt perfection.)

There are also a couple of flubbed lines that feel unnecessary; surely one of the perks of filming the performance is that you can iron out those kinks.

However, much like a Jewish mom, this funny, frequently moving production always means well and has its heart in the right place.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @dedaumier