Uncorking a list of whines

Jackie HOFFMAN comes to the door of her Chelsea apartment in a stained white terrycloth robe, bed hair and fuzzy pink slippers.

She’s not trying to impress anyone.

Hoffman, who for more than two years played three roles in the Broadway hit “Hairspray” -- Penny Pingleton’s mom, Prudy; a high school gym teacher; and a prison matron -- is taking her one-woman show to L.A. She’s appearing at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center’s Renberg Theatre through Jan. 15.

The show, which she performed for almost a year at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, is aptly titled “The Kvetching Continues.”

Aptly, because Hoffman has made a career of whining and joking about her acting opportunities (or lack of) and her love life (or lack of). But now she has a cute (goy) boyfriend and besides her “Hairspray” stint has appeared in a number of movies, including “Kissing Jessica Stein,” “Freaky Friday,” “Garden State” and, most recently, John Waters’ “A Dirty Shame.”

“I’m still an angry, bitter Jew who reacts to everything,” she says. “There’s always something to kvetch about.”

An Orthodox upbringing

Hoffman’s background seems, well, unusual for a comedian. She was raised as one of four children in an Orthodox Jewish household, first in Bayside, N.J., and then in Great Neck, Long Island. In fact, one of her brothers is a Lubavitch Jew living in Israel, one brother is a cantor in Virginia, and her sister still keeps an Orthodox household, also in Virginia.

When looking at photos of family gatherings, Hoffman, with her messy dirty-blondish hair, mod dark-framed glasses and over-the-top, ear-to-ear grin, looks like she mistakenly wandered into the wrong picture.

“My mother was raised Orthodox in Williamsburg -- her parents went straight there from Ellis Island,” says Hoffman, sitting in her one-bedroom apartment, which overlooks Manhattan. “My father was an assimilated German.”

She was the only one of the four sent to study at a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish seminary, and the only one to reject Orthodox Judaism.

“I was raised with the yeshiva background and I rubber-banded back and said, ‘I’m outta here.’

“In my teens I went through that whole National Conference of Synagogues thing, and I was really gung-ho. It was the happiest time of my mother’s life,” she grins wryly. “Then it just started to erode, and the more I became interested in the theater, the more it started to erode.”

Her comic talent, she says, comes largely from her father, who was in advertising. His framed cartoons -- which he drew as a hobby -- decorate one wall, and a large oil painting he did of her two brothers hangs over the couch in her living room.

“My dad was the funniest guy I knew,” she says.

Second City alumna

She began her acting as a way not to be abused as the short, fat kid -- she’s now svelte, but only a tad over 5 feet -- when she transferred from the yeshiva to a Long Island high school. She then attended New York University’s drama program and in 1986 joined Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe, famous as a breeding ground for “Saturday Night Live” stars, including John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray.

There she met playwright and actress Amy Sedaris, who cast her in the play “The Book of Liz,” for which she won an Obie award in 2001.

Her one- or two-woman performances -- she does a holiday show called “Jackie’s Kosher Christmas” and recently appeared with Kristine Zbornik at Joe’s Pub -- are filled with a blistering brew of Jewish jokes (“This is the time when I get cards that say ‘Seasons greetings,’ which is Hallmark for ‘You killed Jesus,’ ”), riffs about hating children (“I would never inflict physical harm on a child, but if you hand me a baby, I won’t support the head”), and obscenities far too scatological to print in a family newspaper.

The Jewish stuff is obvious, but where did the child-hating come from?

“I can’t stand that society forces us to adore them and think that they’re our most precious resource,” she says. And she also hates the pressure society puts on women to have children.

“Now I really understand where gays and lesbians are coming from because I feel that pressure and it’s something I don’t want in my life,” she says, “and now that they’re having them in their lives, I feel betrayed.”

But, she admits, breaking out in a high, squealy version of kootchy koo, she does get that warm feeling when she sees a dog.

OK, there’s all that, but what’s there to complain about in doing a Broadway show?

It wasn’t all glamour, she points out. For example, backstage, the toilets back up. And “doing the same show over and over is boring,” she says. “There were bitter periods of trudging to the dressing room that felt the same as going to the office.”

She also was frustrated as the audience for “Hairspray” began to move away from gays (she’s become something of a gay icon) to families from the Midwest.

A presence grows

John WATERS, who wrote the movie “Hairspray” on which the Broadway show was based, says Hoffman was so good at the first reading that her part was expanded.

“When she came in, everyone loved her,” he says. “Her part became bigger and multilayered. She had a different line, a new ad lib for one part of the play every night.”

Waters says Hoffman is good because “people who are basically angry and can laugh at themselves are always funny.”

Waters also says Hoffman can play virtually any part she wants.

“In ‘Kissing Jessica Stein’ she’s the normal person,” he says. “I want to see her play a sex bomb, because I think she’s sexy.”

In “A Dirty Shame,” which is rated NC-17, Hoffman plays a chronic masturbator. She filmed it while still doing “Hairspray” -- but she missed a day of shooting because she wouldn’t work on Yom Kippur.

It’s hard to imagine her shows appealing to her highly religious family, and she acknowledges that her mother used to tell her father, “ ‘This is not a life for her, she should get married.’ Now it’s still, ‘You should get married.’ ”

Hoffman tells audiences that her mother’s desperation is such that now even a non-Jew is OK, “but she’s become very Mama Rose.” Hoffman slips into her mother’s irritating, insistent tone: “I like it better when you perform solo. Must you use the ‘s’ word so often?”

In fact, the scariest part of leaving “Hairspray,” she says, was telling her mother. She thought about simply continuing to call her at 11:30 every night and pretend she was still appearing in the show.

But she decided that she wanted to invite her mother to her last night, where she received “a great tribute, like if you died,” from composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Backstage, after the show, her mother had one question for them: “Will you ask her back?”

Would she return to Broadway?

“Sure.” A pause. “But with a bigger pot.”

Hoffman knows that being a middle-aged actress usually isn’t the fast road to success, but she is getting quite a name for small but memorable roles, which is good. Of course, big and memorable would be even better.

But no matter how successful she gets, she sees no end to the material.

“That’s what the whole solo show is about,” she says. “I finally made it to Broadway and the kvetching continues. I complain about a trip to Italy. I just find the dark in everything.”

*

‘The Kvetching Continues’

Where: L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center’s Renberg Theatre, the Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place, L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Jan. 14 and 15; 7 p.m. next Sunday

Ends: Jan. 15

Price: $20

Contact: (323) 860-7300