She’s Got a Secret or Two : With a family of characters based on her own life, Sherry Glaser’s ‘Family Secrets’ exorcises the actress’ demons and plays to the grand tradition of Jewish comedy.

Poor Mort Fisher. This weary Jewish accountant is sur rounded by exasperating women. His octogenarian mother, Rose, tried to kill herself by sticking her head in the oven. His manic-depressive wife, Bev, who had a nervous breakdown over a failed lasagna, now holds on to reality with the help of lithium. His teen-age daughter, Sandra, is bulimic and a whiner. Her older sister, Fern, has renounced Judaism as oppressively patriarchal and changed her name to Kahari. More embarrassingly, he reveals during his opening monologue, she showed up with a lesbian lover at his 25th-wedding anniversary celebration.

These are the middle-class family members who inhabit Sherry Glaser’s one-person comedy, “Family Secrets,” returning to Southern California on Thursday after a hit run in New York. Over the course of 100 minutes, performed without intermission on a minimal set, Glaser effortlessly metamorphoses into each of these quirky characters in front of our eyes, using only her voice and body and simple costume changes.

Rose, for one, sends audiences out of their chairs in hysterics. Wearing a shapeless, homely house dress and singing “Hava Nagila,” Rose exhorts everyone to sing along. And most do. “Do you know what a Nagila is?” she asks in a thick “New Yawk Jewish” accent, interrupting the song. “I’ll tell you. A long time ago in Israel when the woman of the house would have guests over, she’d greet them at the door with a plate of flaky pastry called . . . nagila.” For those non-Jews in the audience who aren’t already in tears from laughing uncontrollably, Rose waits a beat, then continues: “She’d say, ‘Hello, have a nagila.’ ”

Glaser, who was raised in New York and now lives in Northern California, has found a way to exorcise the pain and confusion of her upbringing--like countless other Jewish comics before her--through self-deprecating humor. “Family Secrets” is a very personal play about Glaser’s struggle to live with and love and understand herself. Much of the material is autobiographical--all of the characters, in fact, are essentially telling Glaser’s life story, with the exception of the mother--and performing it, Glaser says, is therapeutic. But audiences don’t necessarily see that. Instead, they witness a play that celebrates the nuttiness inherent in every family.

Although some New York critics had reservations about the material’s Borscht Belt-like conventions, Glaser’s acting was universally acclaimed. New York Times critic David Richards, writing in the year-end issue of the Arts and Leisure section, singled out Glaser’s performance as one of the six best of 1993. Howard Kissel, raving in the Daily News, rhetorically wondered why “there wasn’t a ticker-tape parade to welcome her home.”

Following its New York opening on Oct. 6, 1993, middle-aged, Jewish audiences poured in. “Family Secrets” ran Off Broadway at the Westside Arts Theater for 15 months. It could have probably run longer, but, as was contractually agreed from the start, Glaser is taking it on the road instead. The tour begins in Palm Desert, where Glaser will give four performances at the McCallum Theatre, before settling in for a five-week run beginning Feb. 7 at Los Angeles’ 863-seat Henry Fonda Theater, which is reopening after being renovated for earthquake damage.

One would think the 33-year-old Glaser would be as funny offstage as she is on. She probably can be, just not on this late December day nine days before the end of her New York stint. The physical demands of “Family Secrets” have left her exhausted. The absence of her husband, Greg Howells, who co-wrote and directed the show, and their 7-year-old daughter, Dana, makes her lonely--both moved back to Mendocino three months before she closed here. Meanwhile, ongoing marketing and contractual arguments with her producers--David Stone, Amy Nederlander-Case and Irene Pinn, who also happens to be Glaser’s manager--have made her crabby. On top of everything else, the noise from garbage trucks outside her midtown Manhattan apartment, which invariably collect rubbish at 4 a.m., is driving her crazy. So is the thought of going on a 20-week tour.

Over lunch, Glaser kvetches indiscreetly. “Everyone said the risk of taking a one-woman show to New York was huge,” she says. “My producers made it sound like I would be lucky if I ran three or four months.

“So when we originally negotiated the contract,” she continues, “it was with that kind of attitude. I didn’t get exactly what I think I should have. They wouldn’t give me a contract without my agreeing to the tour, before I even came to New York. Even when I had established myself here, I had to fight for little things. When I got sick and had to take a day off, for instance, I had to prove that I was sick.” Like a note from her doctor? “Basically.”

For their part, her producers respond to her complaints sympathetically, noting that Glaser is very tired. Then again, perhaps she is naive about the economics of the theater and what it is that producers do--figure out ways they can make back their money. “Family Secrets” recouped its $300,000 investment in 16 weeks and has earned its backers more than twice that amount, according to Stone, 28.

Or perhaps she’s suffering from a premature bout of post-production blues. After all, Glaser was embraced by New York audiences, who gave her standing ovations every night. The success of “Family Secrets” landed her a book contract with Simon & Schuster, and she was also welcomed into the theater community. Last spring, for instance, she appeared alongside Madeline Kahn, Tracey Ullman, Olympia Dukakis, Laurie Metcalf and Sandra Bernhard in a reading of Tony Kushner’s play “Slavs!,” a benefit performance to raise money for the Lesbian Avengers, the gay rights protest group formed to battle the religious right.

Clearly, Glaser, much like the characters she portrays, is struggling to reconcile the conflicting forces pulling at her. She wants show-biz success--and is delighted, she admits, to finally be making money as an actress--but as a feminist and environmentalist, she also wants to maintain an alternative lifestyle and, in the process, avoid replicating the emotional turmoil of her own childhood.

Home for Glaser is a remote area, among a group of like- minded people, in a house with no electricity or bathroom. There is an outhouse. As a mother, she has never inoculated her child and prefers to teach her at home rather than send her to school. Like the character Fern/Kahari, Glaser was involved in lesbian relationships for six years before meeting her husband in 1985.

In the play, the experience of falling in love with Greg Howells is told through Rose. “With us, sex is awkward,” the character confesses. “Oy, you’re on my hair. Could you get off a minute, I can’t breathe here.’ And sometimes, he’s all hot and heavy and I’m thinking, ‘Did I pay the insurance bill this month?’ You know, your mind wanders. But, he knows right away and he says, ‘Rose, where are you?’ And I say, ‘Rose isn’t here right now, but I can take a message.’ And we laugh and fall asleep holding each other like dear friends.”

Glaser’s own family had its share of anxieties. “My mother had a nervous breakdown when I was 4, eventually went to law school and graduated,” Glaser recalls. “As a child, I was a wreck and felt responsible for it. I was this little kid anticipating the next trauma and I started to self-destruct, subtly at first, then through bulimia and drug abuse.

“Sandra is me as a teen-ager,” she continues. “And Fern’s birth experience is mine, I had my baby at home. Basically, I was depressed until I met Greg. He made me joyful, finally, after 26 years of being unhappy. I love my husband very much, but when he dies, I’m going back--I think I’m going back to women.”

In some ways, the arrival of “Family Secrets” in Los Angeles marks a triumphant homecoming, the completion of a journey that began five years ago. The earliest version of the show was first performed at the Rose Theater in Venice back in 1989, which Glaser self-produced. A revised edition was seen at the Heliotrope Theater in Hollywood a year later and then in San Diego and Irvine. Glaser won an L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award for creation/performance, found a manager in Pinn and was subsequently hired by NBC to write a sitcom based on grandmother Rose.

That television show was never produced--”They said it was too Jewish,” Glaser says, sighing like Mort Fisher--nor did anyone want to remount “Family Secrets” in a larger house, until producer Stone stumbled into a performance of the play in Coconut Grove, Fla., where he happened to be visiting his dad. Raising the capitalization was not difficult, Stone says, but “the deal took a long time to complete, because Sherry wasn’t sure how long a commitment she would make.” Eventually, Glaser agreed to a year in New York, followed by a 39-week tour. Once the show had recovered its investment, those terms were renegotiated.

“New York is still the springboard for anyone who’s a little off center and not Candy Bergen-looking,” says Pinn during a telephone interview, explaining the rationale for installing a then-unknown performer making her New York debut in an expensive Off Broadway theater. “Although the industry in Los Angeles is made up mainly of ex-New Yorkers, they don’t really go to the theater.

“Even with my connections, I had a hard time getting the industry to come see the show. Going to New York worked for Lily, Kathy and Mo, and Whoopi,” adds Pinn, who’s worked with Lily Tomlin and the team of Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney.

As a child named Sheryl Lynn Glaser, she remembers family visits to the Catskills, where she saw comedians such as Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray and Henry Youngman perform. After high school, Glaser entered San Diego State College. She never graduated, but her interest in improvisation and comedy was kindled there.

“It was like the best drugs,” she says. “It was better than drugs, because I could become these characters. All of these different parts of my past, the insanity that I had been filing away and keeping to myself, I could put out without any inhibitions, and it was art.”

To this day, Glaser has never had any formal acting training; she honed her mimicry skills while working with improvisational comedy troupes in Southern California, notably Detour, Hot Flashes and the Egomaniacs. At the urging of her husband, she went solo. Her first one-person show, “Coping” was presented in 1985.

Now, Glaser says, she is ready to move on to another project. Her plans, however, are vague at the moment. “I want to tell women’s stories,” she says. “That’s my focus. Stories about relationships and power and witchcraft. I really want to write my mother’s whole story, probably with her, because her journey is one of the most extraordinary I’ve ever heard.”

Grandmother Rose, at the conclusion of “Family Secrets,” seems to sum it all up: “It was a wonderful wedding. We sang and we danced. Oh, and then there was a fight, because Mort said something to Miguel. I don’t know what he said, but Fern was crying in the bathroom and Bev was yelling at Mort, everybody was screaming, and then we had cake.”