THEATER REVIEW | '25 QUESTIONS FOR A JEWISH MOTHER'

The play “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” which opened at the Ars Nova Theater Company in January, has moved. It opened on Thursday night at St. Luke’s Theater, 308 West 46th Street, Clinton; (212) 239-6200. Following are excerpts from Phoebe Hoban’s review, which appeared in The New York Times on Jan. 27; the full text is here.

Judy Gold, a statuesque presence with a loud voice ranging from sweet to sour, captures the audience from the moment she opens her mouth in “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother.” This 70-minute monologue, written with Kate Moira Ryan, is based on more than 50 interviews with Jewish mothers across the United States, conducted over a five-year period.

Ms. Gold, an Emmy Award winner for her work on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” is a veteran stand-up comic who was among the comedians featured in the film “The Aristocrats.” In “25 Questions” she seamlessly weaves anecdotes from her own life with snippets from the interviews; she’s the single, Jewish, kosher-kitchen lesbian mother of two sons, with a strident Jewish mother of her own. (“I’m like a documentary premiering at a gay film festival in Berlin, ‘Das Orthodyke,’ ” she says.) The results are fiercely funny, honest and moving.

Ms. Gold whips up a rich borscht of vivid characters: her own mother, Rivka, or Ruth; her lesbian partner, Wendy, who hankers for a baby; their sons, Henry and Ben. (They each gave birth to one.) We also meet an Orthodox woman whose son died of complications from AIDS, a Chinese woman who converted to Judaism, several Holocaust survivors and the family ghost that inspired much of Ruth’s obsessiveness.

Ms. Gold’s well-paced delivery is a perfect match for her material. Whether she’s opining about her mother (“Over the years things got so bad between my mother and I, we stopped talking to each other and started communicating by putting Ann Landers articles on the refrigerator”) or joking about the diary of Anne Frank (her mother read her the pop-up version: “Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead.”); whether lip-synching Barbra Streisand or repeating an off-color remark she made about President Bush that got her listed as a homeland security risk, Ms. Gold gives “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother” her comic — and compassionate — all.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company