Man Behind ‘The Mad Dancer’ : Theater: Yehuda Hyman uses the wanderings of an Everyschmoe word processor to explore the many facets of Semitic cultural identity.

Klezmer music and mystical Judaism aren’t the usual stuff of today’s performance art, but Yehuda Hyman is about to toss his yarmulke into the ring and change all that. And has he got stories to tell.

Using the wanderings of a fictional Jew named Elliott Green, Hyman explores the multiple facets of Semitic cultural identity in his “The Mad Dancers,” opening tonight at the Taper, Too.

That Jewishness isn’t monocultural, though, might well be news to many. “When we did workshops, people asked ‘Why are those Jews speaking Spanish?,’ ” says Hyman, seated in a Taper rehearsal room. “A lot of American Jews have no idea about Sephardim (Spanish Jews).”

Subtitled “A Mystical Comedy With Ecstatic Dance,” Hyman’s work was developed in the Mark Taper’s 1992-93 and 1993-94 New Work Festivals. Directed here by Richard Seyd, it features the author, Arnobio S. Dos Santos and Teresa Taduri.

Adapted from “The 7 Beggars” by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav and a parable by Nachman’s great-grandfather, the Baal Shem Tov, “The Mad Dancers” tells the story of an Everyschmoe word processor who embarks on a long, strange trip. He meets seven people with disabilities, goes for a bus ride and winds up in a mysterious motel.

At the motel, Elliott crosses paths with a magical suitcase and “out of the suitcase comes the rest of the play, which is his journey into different worlds,” Hyman says.

The first part of “The Mad Dancers” is set in Elliott’s world, which is that of an Ashkenazic Jew in San Francisco. “The second (part) goes into this Sephardic world, sort of pre-expulsion Spain, but not really,” Hyman says.

The music in the second part is in Ladino, which is the language of the Sephardic Jews. “When the Jews were kicked out in 1492, they were speaking a sort of Castillian Spanish,” says Hyman of Ladino’s origins. “They incorporated Hebrew into Spanish.”

Hyman isn’t a Sephardic Jew. He is the son of a Polish refugee father and a Russian refugee mother who was raised in Turkey after her family fled the revolution. “My father was from generations of tailors and my mother was from generations of hat makers, so it was a good match,” he says.

Yet because Hyman’s father was the only member of a family of seven siblings to survive the Holocaust, Hyman grew up in an L.A. household where being Jewish was associated with both pride and pain.

“It was stressed to me that I was a Jew,” Hyman says. “But there was this double thing, not to let them know you’re Jewish because it’s dangerous. It’s like you’ve been handed this jewel, at the same time, there’s this shame.”

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Hyman developed an interest in dance as a teen-ager and went on to study at Maurice Bejart’s interdisciplinary school of the performing arts, MUDRA, in Brussels.

When he returned to the United States, he began working as a chorus dancer in musical theater. Later, he began to write and perform his own works. At first, they were mostly dance-based--including a show about a man who is obsessed with the tango--but they have become more text-oriented in recent years.

Three years ago, Hyman won a fellowship from the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity to go to Jerusalem for four weeks. It was his first trip to Israel.

There he participated, along with other artists, in a workshop on Jewish culture. “It was a very intense workshop, very Jewish,” Hyman says. “Things went on and on.”

While in Israel, he also had time to explore. “When I was in Jerusalem, I went to the Hasidic section,” he says. “I also spent a couple of nights in a motel in Safed, a town in the north that was the center of mystical Judaism.”

When he came back, Hyman wanted to weave his epiphanies into a theater piece. “I was going to create a solo piece, a little shtickele half-hour about these things,” he says.

Hyman had, in fact, long contemplated doing a show on his cultural identity. “I always knew I was going to do the Jew thing,” he says. “I also had tremendous resistance to it. I probably knew that once I started, I was going to be consumed by it.”

The project grew when a rabbi friend pointed Hyman toward Rabbi Nachman’s writings. A controversial figure who died in 1810 at age 38, Nachman told 13 sacred stories during his lifetime.

They are no less relevant today. “A lot of his teachings are about overcoming depression,” Hyman says. “He really dealt with the dark side.”

Of course, like many of the great Rabbis, the sage also had a sense of humor. “Rabbi Nachman said, ‘They’re very, very deep stories,’ ” Hyman says, “ ‘but they’re also cute and you’ll enjoy them.’ ”

* “The Mad Dancers,” Taper , Too, John Anson Ford Theatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood Hills, today-May 11 and 15-17, 8 p.m., $15. (213) 972-7392.