Judy Gold brings raw, unique comedy to D.C.’s Theater J

Judy Gold has performed at Theater J before, but her last offering there was very different from the current show, “Mommy Queerest (It’s Jewdy’s Show!).” In “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” she presented the results of 50 interviews conducted on a cross-country trek to find out the meaning of Jewish motherhood. In “Mommy Queerest,” Gold takes us on a more internal trip, examining the ways in which her personality was formed by her family and by the endless television sitcoms she watched to escape the reality of her own life.

Gold is nothing if not straightforward. She was (so she says) unpopular, a too-tall girl who didn’t fit in, who fought with her mother and longed to make people laugh. Happily for the world, Gold followed her dream, becoming a successful stand-up comedienne and a proud, gay mother of two boys.

With a no-holds-barred book written by Gold, Kate Moira Ryan, Eric Kornfeld and Bob Smith, Gold performs on a stage shared only with a piano, a stool and a microphone. Periodically, she plays the theme song of a remembered television show, or music she has written herself.

As Gold reminisces about the imaginary “families” she escaped to during her younger years — “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties,” “Laverne and Shirley,” to name a few — photos of those shows flash on a huge screen behind her, interspersed with photos of Gold from the time she was in a carriage until she was in college. Gold’s narratives about those shows and photos are interspersed with re-enactments of conversations with her parents, her sister, her first girlfriend, etc. Director Amanda Charlton keeps the show’s pace swift.

Throughout “Mommy Queerest,” Judy inserts self-deprecating humor and mimics critical voices from the past, unsubtle reminders that the source of Gold’s success is her acerbic wit. On the issue of same-sex marriage, for instance, Gold makes her feelings abundantly clear.

But “Mommy Queerest” is not a piece of political theater. It’s proof that a liberated, funny, uninhibited, intelligent woman can create the loving environment she always longed for. Her own television sitcom will undoubtedly come.