FRINGE FESTIVAL : ONE-WOMAN BRAVURA PERFORMANCE : WHAT A ‘PERSONALITY’!

In Wendy Wasserstein’s play “Isn’t It Romantic,” we met Janie Blumberg, the insecure, unhappy, hugely badgered daughter of overweening, well-intentioned parents of the Jewish kind.

So loving and well-meaning were they, so unaware of the impact all that advice and all that attention had on the fragile persona of their beloved daughter, that they would have been horrified to hear they’d had something directly to do with her unhappiness.

In Gina Wendkos’ one-woman show “Personality,” at the Odyssey for a fast three weekends (a shorter version of this show played there in 1985), we meet essentially the same girl. This time her name is Heather, but her problems are the same. And does she have a mother.

Wendkos’ mother and daughter are played here by the same actress, Ellen Ratner, in as sharplydelineated and honed a bravura performance as it is possible to imagine. Oh yes, Ratner offers an appealing Heather with all the vulnerabilities of the miserable, fairly plain, fearful and self-loathing young woman Heather is.

Heather floats. She’s a good kid buffeted by every tide. No personality. She tends bar because it’s a living--a job she could get when there really wasn’t anything else she wanted to do more. But it is in the portrait of Heather’s adenoidal mother--and in that mother’s constant sitting in judgment of her daughter--that Ratner triumphs.

This isn’t just a pushy and bossy mom. This is the nonstop yakker of Noo Yawk with acute tele-phonitis--the yenta queen of Queens, her voice a razor blade to the ear, her words demolition crews to the soul, her thoughts bulldozers to the ego.

There is nothing this mom doesn’t know. If only Heather would listen to her , if only she had met the boy’s parents, if only Heather understood that you don’t speak the truth. You have to lie in this world because nobody wants to hear the truth. . . .

For an hour and 15 minutes Ratner sustains a three-way nonconversation with herself--first as Ma (jackhammering away at husband Sol or into the phone to Heather), then as Heather (talking to the audience, or into the phone to mother or to her boyfriend Leonard) and finally conducting solemn exchanges with the disembodied voice of her almighty therapist (booming over a loudspeaker the better to imitate God and intimidate Heather).

For an hour and 15 minutes, bathed in a small pool of light, Ratner creates a world without leaving her seat (except for a phenomenal 10 minutes in which she introduces us with lightning speed and dead-on accuracy to every ethnic minority in New York City). The transitions are as clear as they are nimble, some skillfully pulled off as much by implication as by action.

Ratner is at her best as Monstermom, this piranha who has pegged her daughter in these “post Bo Derek” days as a low 6. Once, says she, Heather was a 7 (“I don’t know what she did to herself that day”), but fundamentally she sees her daughter as a slob, somebody socially awkward who spills on herself: “She doesn’t clean. She doesn’t cook. Tell me,” she wails to the ever-absent Sol in a voice of terminal nasality, “what man is going to want to have anything to do with her?”

Plot points are not the point in “Personality,” however. Personality is. It’s about character and one honorable and rather nice young woman’s struggle for identity in a world of predators and dominators.

What makes it all work so sublimely is the creative marriage between Wendkos and Ratner (Wendkos conceived the piece and created it with Ratner, who is a sometime stand-up comedienne as well as an old friend). The work is so symbiotic that it’s impossible to know where Wendkos ends and Ratner begins. Nor does it matter. The piece, inexorably, belongs to them both.

Lucky for us that we’ve been invited to listen and look in. Luckier still if the show could be persuaded to extend.

Performances at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 12111 Ohio Ave. in West Los Angeles, run Friday-Saturday, 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 4. Tickets: $12.50-$14.50; (213) 826-1626.