STAGE REVIEW : ‘Family Secrets’ Is Back and Better

If you missed Sheri Glaser’s “Family Secrets” when it blew into town late last year, you’re in for a treat. If you saw it, see it again--while you can. There are some differences from last time: It’s been trimmed and gussied up by director Art Wolff.

But more important, Glaser’s San Diego-nurtured career is more clearly than ever in the launch mode; this rocket may blast off at any moment.

“Family Secrets,” a Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company co-production, plays at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre through Dec. 15.

What makes Glaser’s show so special is, in part, Glaser herself--a chameleon-like talent who segues from playing a father, a mother, two daughters (one a rebellious teen-ager) and an 80-year-old grandmother and needs only the most modest costume changes set off each one’s spirit, stance, way of talking and way of walking.

There is also the material itself, co-scripted by Glaser with her husband, Greg Howells.

Nothing earthshaking happens in “Family Secrets,” but Glaser knows how to find the enduring in the everyday stories of a Jewish family from the Bronx that has moved to California, a family not unlike her own, Glaser has said.

There’s Mort, an accountant by profession and by nature. He’s the one who introduces the piece, ruefully “accounting” for some of the bizarre (to him) goings on in his family: his wife, Beverly, who goes crazy--literally--trying to be a perfect mother (her kids, she complains, just won’t cooperate); his eldest daughter, Fern, a free spirit who takes us from the gay life to the straight life through natural childbirth (and reveals that she finally understands why women die in childbirth--”it’s preferable”); his teen-age daughter, Sandra, who is constantly embroiled with her mother; and grandmother Rose, who discovers true love and also understands the need for family--even when they scream and drive you crazy (“Without family, we’d all be strangers,” she explains).

Under Wolff’s direction, the show is a lean and mean 80 minutes, without intermission. Some who saw the show last time may miss pet jokes, but overall Wolff has snipped the loose threads, pumping up the dramatic impact.

The best change is that now Glaser does her metamorphoses on stage. Instead of going off stage and flashing confusing photo montages during the pause between characters, as she did last year, Glaser stays on and sings as she adjusts a wig, switches a top, puts on makeup. In each case, at a crucial point in the transformation, her delivery takes on the register and delivery of the new person--an effect that achieves its biggest punch when she transforms from the raucous teen-ager into the quavering octogenarian.

All of this shows off Glaser’s talent, but the result is more than just showing off.

These changes, like all good acting, underscore the fundamental point that most people are the same underneath superficial externals.

In a more subtle way, Glaser suffuses the piece with loving and humorous insights into the varieties of understanding in a family. It is in part because Sandra is a teen-ager that she and her mother cannot understand each other. As Sandra grows up, her feelings may change, as Fern’s have done, as when, by simply going through childbirth and becoming a mother, she discovers things about her relationship with her own mother that had completely eluded her.

This show is a treasure. San Diego is lucky to have it back.

‘FAMILY SECRETS’

By Sheri Glaser and Greg Howells. Director is Art Wolff. Lighting by Barth C. Ballard. With Sheri Glaser. Tickets are $20-22. At 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays with Sunday matinees at 2 through Dec. 15. At 444 4th Ave., San Diego, 234-9583.