You don’t have to be Jewish to have a Jewish heart,” is the theme of Monica Piper’s hilarious and touching one-woman show, Not That Jewish, which just opened at The Braid, L.A.’s brand-new performance space, for a five-week run.
Piper, a seasoned comedian and Emmy-winning TV writer (“Rugrats”), looks back on her life in largely self-deprecating fashion, poking fun at herself every chance she gets. But what makes her performance more than just generic stand-up is the way she also bravely confronts the dark side of her life: two failed marriages, pain-ridden death of her parents, being diagnosed herself with breast cancer. The tears she wrings out of you make the laughter all the more sweet.
Piper grew up in a New York household where humor was the coin of the realm. Her father and mother had toured the country doing a record act (miming pop songs in satirical fashion); her feisty grandmother loved bawdy jokes. It was inevitable that Monica should become a comic (after a brief interlude teaching high-school English, a job she gave up because, as she said, “I couldn’t handle the money and prestige”).
After a stint at Second City in Chicago, she became, successively, a singing waitress, regular at the Comedy Store, then a comic on the national circuit. She also got married twice, first to a blonde, handsome, Gentile lawyer (who ultimately confessed that he didn’t find her funny), then to a talented young musician who turned out to be a coke-addict. Hurt and lonely, she decided to adopt a child and raise him by herself. An agency put her in touch with an 18-year-old girl in Georgia who did not have the wherewithal to care properly for a second baby. That baby became Monica’s son Jake, a beloved boy who gave her all kinds of heartache when puberty hit. Not only did he play the rebel by sporting a green Mohawk and becoming a grouch, he suddenly flared up at her one day, when she was talking about Judaism, shouting, “But I’m not Jewish!”
That remark triggered a reckoning on her part. She had always considered herself to be a “Jew–ish kind of woman.” But what did that really mean to her, a woman raised in a largely secular, non-observant way? What is the essence, the special thing, about being as Jew?
How she found the answers to those questions is what gives Not That Jewish its depth, its dimensions. Much like Billy Crystal in 700 Sundays, Piper tells her personal story in such an honest way that it becomes not just compelling but universal.
