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After years of playing unpleasant stereotypes of Jewish women on such shows as 'Seinfeld' and 'Mad about You,' Annie Korzen has taken to the stage to portray the real self she's come to be proud of New York SOMETIMES LIFE IMITATES ART. Sometimes art imitates life. Sometimes you can't tell the difference.
Take, for instance, Annie Korzen. Since mid-June, theatergoers have been able to catch Korzen's one-woman musical autobiography one night a week at the Soho Playhouse in downtown Manhattan. This upbeat cri de coeur is generously solipsistic as Korzen hustles the audience along on her tour of self-discovery from the Bronx to Beverly Hills.
Annie Korzen has been an actress a good deal of her adult life, and because her features are what they are, type-casting has been her ticket. Her hair is dark, her complexion olive, her hips undulant and her face proboscisly endowed in short, a poster girl for ethnic stereotyping.
Embellishing a real-life experience a bit for the stage, she describes a rather Freudian-sounding incident on a flight: "The man sitting next to me is dressed in lederhosen and a green hat with a feather in it. 'Entschuldig, fraulein,' he says, 'you are a Jewish woman, isn't it not?'"
Annie, terrified, nods assent.
"You have been to Israel?"
"Not yet," Annie confesses.
"Vot!" the Teutonic gentleman explodes. "Shame on you! And you call yourself ein Jude!"
At a Los Angeles dinner party, she was asked: "Annie, when is Tisha Be'av this year?" When she allowed that she didn't have a clue, her inquisitor said, "Well, if you don't know, who will?"
The truth is, Korzen is Judaically challenged, as she describes in her act. "I was not brought up in a religious home. My parents were lefty-union-labor-atheist- socialists. They belonged to any organization that had a 'W' in it: the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the International Workers Order, the Workmen's Circle. On Yom Kippur, we used to sneak downtown to see a musical because it was the easiest day of the year to get tickets."
If Korzen inherited a ladleful of identity confusion from her Eastern-European immigrant parents, she also was heir to an ear for music and a flair for performance.
"My mother, Sonia, was a depressed agoraphobic....