Hedwig’s Angry Jewess Husband

Four years ago, Miriam Shor was an unemployed actor whose only credit was a bit part in a road show of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“I played the third villager on the left,” she quips.

Then her agent handed her a scrap of paper with the description of a character in a new glam-punk rock musical,”Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which tells of a German transvestite diva whose botched sex change leaves him with an abridged member and an identity crisis. Shor was up for the role of Hedwig’s long-suffering husband, Yitzhak, who was “A man to be played by a woman. Surly, Jewish, Croatian, ex-drag queen billed as Krystall Nacht, the Last Jewess of the Balkans,” according to the slip of paper.

Shor, who still carries that tattered scrap of paper in her wallet, didn’t bat an eyelash at the prospect of playing a man. She aced the audition and went on to create the role of Yitzhak in the hit off-Broadway production of “Hedwig.” She reprises the role in the electrifying film version, which won the Audience and Director’s Awards at Sundance this year and opens today in Los Angeles.

(Hedwig is played by the film and play’s writer-director, John Cameron Mitchell. Though Mitchell was not previously a drag queen, he now rivals RuPaul as the most famous drag diva in America.)

“I don’t think of myself as a drag performer,” confides Shor, who is in her late 20s. “But I was drawn to the role because the story is so subversive. I like that it challenges perspectives about what a man is and what a woman is. I like that it forces viewers to rethink their labels about sex and sexuality.”

Shor says she also appreciates the subtle Jewish content of the piece, which is equally subversive. “Hedwig the German oppresses Yitzhak the Jew, which is supposed to sound familiar,” she says. All Yitzhak wants to be is a drag queen, but Hedwig won’t let him. Hedwig gets to wear stiletto heels and zebra-print spandex, while Yitzhak has to wear ratty jeans and a beard. “Hedwig’s feeling is, ‘If I can’t express myself, neither can you,'” Shor says.

She feels it’s ironic that her brooding character is named Yitzhak, which means “he who laughs” in Hebrew. “Yitzhak is the most unhappy human being on the planet,” she says with a laugh.

The story has a couple of Jewish in-jokes. In one musical number, Yitzhak wears a cook’s hat inscribed with Hebrew letters spelling out the English word, “Chef.”

Like the fictional Yitzhak, Shor is a Wandering Jew. After her parents divorced when she was 7, she shuttled between her father’s house in suburban Detroit and her mother’s expatriate digs in Turin, Italy. In Turin, young Miriam met the famed Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi.

In Detroit, she learned Yiddish at a Workmen’s Circle program but felt like an outcast at her WASPy public school. “I was sort of weird and nerdy, and my teeth stuck out, like, 5 feet from my face,” she recalls. “I was constantly picked on, so I can totally relate to Yitzhak.”

Shor ultimately found a home in her high school drama department — but was rejected from the musical theater program at the University of Michigan. Undaunted, she took drama classes; after graduation, she packed up her jalopy, moved to New York and promptly landed the “Fiddler” gig.

To prepare to play Yitzhak, Shor followed men down the street and copied how they moved. “I also used a memory of a guy from high school,” she reveals. “He wore a Metallica T-shirt and big combat boots and he walked down the hall with the air of, ‘F–you, I don’t care what you think.’ But of course, he cared a lot.”

Yitzhak also pretends not to care. “He’s decided that if he’s not allowed to be this fabulous drag queen, he’ll be the opposite,” she says. “If he can’t put on the eyelashes and the rouge, he’s not even going to shower.”

Shor’s performance was so flawless that crew members and viewers gasped when they discovered she was actually a woman. “This hasn’t been the easiest time in my life to get a date,” admits Shor, a heterosexual.

At least “Hedwig” has kicked her career up a notch. This fall, Shor will star as Julie Herman in “Inside Schwartz,” a new NBC sitcom. “I’m making her Jewish,” the actor proclaims. She also loves to tease Breckin Meyer, the non-Jew who plays Schwartz. “I’m always telling him, ‘You need to do more research,'” she says.

While shopping for an outfit for “Hedwig’s” premiere a couple weeks ago (a Barbie doll head necklace was high on her list), Shor had high hopes for the film. “I hope the story will continue to broaden people’s minds,” says the actor, who once resisted a Yitzhak-like impluse to belt someone who made a homophobic remark about the show. “People can be so disappointing in their decision that difference is bad; I tend to be a cockeyed pessimist about that. But it gives me hope when people relate to Hedwig. They realize we all may not dress the same, but we are all trying to find out who we are and what will make us whole.”