‘Family Secrets’ Star’s Stage Success Is Relative : Theater: Sheri Glaser draws on her background for the characters of her one-woman show that comes to Irvine.

When Sheri Glaser got out of high school, she knew how to type. That, in her opinion, meant she could become a poet or--as a fallback--a secretary.

“Which ought to tell you what I was like,” said Glaser, recalling a mixed-up adolescence recently in her sparsely furnished Topanga Canyon shack.

More than typing, however, a hidden talent for comic acting, which didn’t surface until after Glaser was out of high school, has turned out to be her greatest asset.

Now, at 31, the Bronx-born actress-comedian has developed something of a cult following and expectations of greater success with a one-woman show in which she plays five wildly different characters.

“Family Secrets”--booked the next two Mondays at the Improv in Irvine--earned her a 1991 Creation Performance award, bestowed earlier this month by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle. During a yearlong run that ended in March at the Heliotrope Theatre in Los Angeles, Glaser was described as everything from a female Holden Caulfield to a young Lily Tomlin.

Meanwhile, New York theater producer Richard Frankel, who backed “Driving Miss Daisy” a few years ago, says he is negotiating to bring “Family Secrets” to Manhattan for an Off Broadway production in the fall.

“She’s absolutely wonderful,” he said by telephone earlier this week. “We don’t have a done deal, but it’s our intention to do it. I think she’s going to be a big star.”

What does Glaser make of all this?

“I get high on it,” she said, grinning broadly. “I love it, and I’m amazed by it. It’s like--wow!--I’m on my way. Maybe one day I’ll be called a mature Sheri Glaser.”

The five characters this tall, angular-faced brunette depicts in “Family Secrets” are more or less based on her relatives. They are brought to wacky life not only through monologues and costumes but through acute body language.

Although nobody has yet called Glaser a Jewish Tracey Ullman, that would also apply. Like Ullman, she not only captures very specific characters with her atmospheric impersonations but can nail down an entire social class in a comic style that is both antic and touching.

The secrets she reveals, moreover, are not that far from the facts.

“I do check to see if it’s OK to use something,” said Glaser, who writes her own material and has her husband, Greg Howells, polish it. “Sometimes if something is too close to reality, my family will ask me to change it. Other times I change it because of my own emotional pilot. But they love what I do. They can’t believe I’m not on Broadway already.”

First in her cast of characters comes middle-aged Mort, the father, a mild-mannered tax accountant with simple tastes (he likes “a good cheese Danish”). His frequent refrain, “Do what makes you happy,” reflects a laissez-faire philosophy inevitably backed up by a handy checkbook secreted in the vest pocket of his three-piece suit.

Next comes Mort’s platinum-blonde wife, Bev, a recovered mental patient who is “maintaining” with the help of daily medication. Now that she’s a student in law school and no longer feels the need to be “the perfect mother,” Bev is considering taking up a judicial career.

Then there’s elder daughter Fern, a bohemian who once changed her name to Kahari and took a lesbian lover (a nice Jewish tax lawyer). Now, though, Fern has settled down with a spiritual medium named Miguel and has given birth to a daughter. Her Herculean labor, re-enacted in detail, was more painful than death. (“I realize why women die in childbirth--it’s preferable.”)

We also meet Fern’s younger sister, Sandra, a teen-ager who has been grounded and feels like she’s “under house arrest.” Between screaming matches with Bev about the dirty dishes, Sandra recalls how she lost her virginity the night before to a boozy high school senior. She had fantasies of “Dirty Dancing,” it seems, but her experience was closer to date rape.

Wrapping up this quintet is Grandma Rose, a jut-jawed octogenarian whose age--not to mention her frail, bent body--belies her status as a newlywed. With husband Milton, she has rediscovered both romance and sex. What’s more, they had a “gefilte fish swan” at the wedding reception, she quips George Burns-style.

Despite the current popularity of one-person stage confessions--from the gossipy (Robert Morse in “Tru”) to the guilt-ridden (Wallace Shawn in “The Fever”)--Glaser’s theatrical impulse to expose her family’s secrets goes a long way back--to UC San Diego, where she enrolled in 1978.

“I wanted to get as far away from my parents as I possibly could,” said Glaser, who grew up in Oceanside, N.Y., a middle-class suburb on Long Island. “I looked at the map and thought, ‘California.’ But I didn’t know which city to pick. San Francisco? Too cold. Los Angeles? Not pretty. San Diego? Summer camp. I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m going to camp.’

“So I took this improv class. Actually, my boyfriend at the time told me to take it. He came to me and said, ‘Sheri, I need your help.’ I said, ‘What do I have to do?’ And he said, ‘Come into this classroom without a bra, just a T-shirt, and shake your breasts and say: “I got me three beers and a fistful of downs / But I’m gonna get wrecked so screw you clowns.”

“I said, ‘You want me to walk into a roomful of strangers and say that in front of a professor?’ He said, ‘Yeah, if you love me.’ Well, I thought I loved him, so I did it--but I wore a bra. The professor came over to me and said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘Enroll in my class. We’ll find out.’ ”

For the first time, Glaser recalled, “my life went ‘click.’ This was it. This was what I wanted to do. Accents came. Ages came. Everything. I discovered a whole style.” She also discovered you can play just so many improv games before it gets “kind of boring.”

And so, three years later, Glaser left college without graduating to join an all-female comedy troupe called Hot Flashes. It played clubs and theaters to positive reviews in San Diego as well as other West Coast cities during the early ‘80s.

“We were politically correct and we were making a nice living,” said Glaser, recalling that the group once had equal billing with Whoopi Goldberg at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. “But there was a power hierarchy. Somebody else was always making the decisions. I got tired of that after three or four years.”

Besides, she added slyly, “I wanted to be politically incorrect sometimes.”

With another woman from Hot Flashes, Glaser created the Egomaniacs, a trio that included the woman’s husband. It lasted a couple of years until 1986, when Glaser realized she might as well work solo because the seven characters she was impersonating, many of them early versions of those in “Family Secrets,” would make a show of their own.

“I stayed in San Diego to get into the theater there, but it was tight,” Glaser recounted. “They wouldn’t let me in. That’s why I left. I had to.”

Not that it was easier in Los Angeles. After showcases (backed by a film producer who had taken an interest in gaining her exposure) at the Tiffany and the Court theaters, she received no stage offers whatsoever.

She did, however, pick up an option to write a TV sitcom about Grandma Rose.

“I wrote it,” Glaser said, “but they didn’t like it. They didn’t want Rose in a Jewish family, which was just ridiculous. She’s this old Jewish lady. She’s bound to have a Jewish family.”

By 1988, still with no stage prospects, Glaser rented the 50-seat Rose Theatre in Venice for $100 a night and put on “Family Secrets” every Sunday for as long as she could pay the rent. The show eventually caught the eye of a TV reviewer, who gave it a plug, and that led to the yearlong run at the Heliotrope.

Even so, Glaser is wary of Los Angeles audiences. For all her success at the Heliotrope, she’s not convinced they’re fond of theater.

“I think people in Los Angeles have an attitude, like Whaddya got ?” she said. “I also think a lot of them get dragged to the theater. I’m up there working hard, and I see people asleep in the seats. Then, at the end of the show, they jump up and say, ‘Oh, that’s really wonderful!’ Great. Meanwhile, I’ve been through the mill.”

Does Glaser expect audiences to be any different in Irvine?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Irvine’s on the way to San Diego, so maybe it’ll be like San Diego. The audiences down there are great. They really love the theater.”

And New York?

“I can’t wait to get there,” she said. “Everybody knows New York’s a theater town. Anyway, it’s my dream to be seen where I grew up.”

“Family Secrets” plays Monday and April 29 at 8:30 p.m. at the Improv, 4255 Campus Drive, Suite 138, Irvine. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 854-5455.