A Ma Who Really Cares

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner begat the 2,000-year-old man, to our eternal comic benefit. Three years ago Sherry Glaser begat Ma, the kvetchy, loving creator of the universe, ladling on the advice in “Oh My Goddess!,” now at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.

Ma, a.k.a. Goddess, is the personification of Chicken Soup for the Soul, with a welcome taste for frankness. (In passing she mentions it was she who invented the clitoris, adding a deadpan “You’re welcome.”) Instead of her husband’s Ten Commandments, she prefers to offer a few suggestions--”I don’t want to push,” she says.

Among the encouragements: Love yourself; don’t be afraid to cry; go outside and play. And quit polluting a perfectly nice planet. “Water . . . you’re buying water. . . . Something is wrong,” she says.

Glaser has scored with this archetype before. The bountifully talented writer-performer rose to national prominence in her one-woman show “Family Secrets,” which enjoyed wide acclaim in various Southern California engagements, before and after its 1993 off-Broadway premiere.

The climactic monologue in that piece belonged to Rose, the fractured family’s matriarch. Ma, unlike Rose, favors a vine-decorated body stocking, and has the edge in terms of years. Yet these two are spiritual twins.

“Oh My Goddess!” introduces Ma by way of a more diffuse character, Miguel de Cervantes (not that one, another one), a channeler of spirits who works as a waiter. The young man has visited his past lives with the help of the Psychic Friends Hotline. He’s grieving the death of his father, a problematic influence on Miguel.

“Nobody told me how to be a man,” Miguel allows, “so I grew up to be a jerk.”

In this role, Glaser cops a raspy, too-much-marijuana vocal delivery and an air of self-conscious machismo. (Perhaps to allay any cultural sensitivity questions, Glaser lists a pair of “Latino cultural consultants” prominently in the program.) Miguel’s past-life memories of working the Last Supper--another echo of Mel Brooks--are often very funny.

Some choice lines aside, Miguel feels like two or three characters fighting for focus within one. Glaser uses him to explore notions of manhood and spiritual yearning, but at present the two halves of “Oh My Goddess!” remain discrete. They show off Glaser’s considerable performance range without fully connecting with each other.

Even if it falls short of “Family Secrets,” it’s still fun. At show’s end, the Jewish mother of us all conducts a question-and-answer session with the audience, and here, the performer’s improvisational roots pay off. Who invented golf?, one audience member inquired last Saturday night. “Some schnorrer,” quoth Ma. “God only knows.”

“Oh My Goddess!,” Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Thursdays through Sundays, 8:30 p.m. Ends March 14. $18. (310) 315-1459. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.