STAGE REVIEW : ‘Grandma Sylvia’s’ Riotous Funeral

Mourners at “Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral,” a hands-on sendup of a Jewish funeral service, are mingling with the audience outside the Hudson Backstage when a makeshift hearse pulls up with a plain wooden casket.

Pallbearers rush to remove the box when it suddenly slips from their grasp and crashes to the street, pinning one of the bereaved underneath it. Amid the shrieking and screaming, someone forgets to remove the red price tag taped to the coffin--”As Is: $499.”

Welcome to Sunday afternoon services for Sylvia Schildner Grossman at the Helsenrott Jewish Mortuary, where they treat your loved one like mishpachah (one of the family).

L.A. theater has had “Tamara,” “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” and “Barry Moses’ Bar Mitzvah,” but interactive theater reaches new levels of participatory chaos with “Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral.”

Conceived by director Glenn Wein and Amy Lord, who met while performing in “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” in New York, the production is the result of a series of improvisations that Wein and Lord developed in a workshop with 21 other colleagues, who all appear in the show. It owes a lot to “Tony and Tina’s Wedding,” but this is environmental comedy that stretches the form further yet.

The comedy’s strength is 23 distinct characters and a narrative anchor centered on a matriarch’s death and its effect on an extended family divided into warring generations. Even the Helsenrott Funeral Home is changing. It will soon become, we learn from a flyer stuffed into our programs, Club Mortuary, a dance club.

For that matter, there’s plenty of dancing at Grandma’s funeral, which turns into a riotous service, complete with crazed testimonials and a mitzvah meal followed by dancing and songs that offer everything from “Hava Nagila” to Barbra Streisand.

This is not a show for couch potatoes. After the eulogy and remembrances, in which a zonked-out Grossman grandson with a bandana named skyBoy (Richard Tanner) tries to remove all his clothes, the polite arena seating breaks up into interactive bedlam with the cast.

A rabbi (David Ellzey) vainly tries to maintain decorum. A little old lady (Flora Burke) scurries about like a gnat, patting arms and whispering that the Grossman granddaughter in the outrageously short skirt (Amy Lord) “is trash.”

A surly gentleman (Stu Levin), the reluctant deep pockets of the Schildner clan, sneers at everybody. His companion (Holgie Forrester) flamboyantly arrives in a tight leopard-skin dress. (Costumes, hair and wigs are sharply rendered by Keith Wein.)

Finally, after the mitzvah meal (raw vegetables, cheeses, pastries) and bunny hopping, in which the entire audience is swept into a frolic on a dance floor that’s been transformed into the Helsenrott Gardens, funeral director Vlad Helsenrott, who studied his craft in Transylvania (the gleeful Steven J. McCarthy), waves an arm to signal the funeral’s over.

“All right, everybody out!” he smiles. You leave your yarmulke at the door.

* “Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral,” Hudson Backstage, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Sundays only, 2 p.m. Indefinitely. $18 (including food). (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours.