In the Weston, Conn., cotillion class she was forced to attend at age 12, Nancy Balbirer learned that girls were expected to wear white gloves, to keep a dance card — and to keep quiet.
"Ladies weren’t supposed to be raucous or funny or irreverent, but I was all of those things, and I associated them with being Jewish," says the performer, whose witty autobiographical monologue, "I Slept With Jack Kerouac," at the Court Theatre, recounts her journey from repressed girl to empowered woman.
Her odyssey began when she bonded with her Aunt Betsy, an actress who provided respite from Weston’s WASP Hell. "She used salty language and she was theatrical," says the performer, whose dad is Jewish and mother, Lutheran. The routines young Nancy invented to rouse Betsy from her depressions taught her about the healing power of performance.
After appearing in the off-Broadway revival of "Hurlyburly" and recurring roles on "Seinfeld," Balbirer felt anything but powerful. "As an actress, you get so depressed, waiting around for people to call you," says Balbirer, who was also nursing a broken heart. (Her ex’s breakup line: he couldn’t commit because he was the reincarnation of freewheeling beat author Jack Kerouac.)
To cope, Balbirer took a memoir-writing workshop in 1999 and began writing "Kerouac," which concludes with her visit to a bubbe-like Wiccan. To help her get over her boyfriend, the Yiddish-speaking witch advises Balbirer to burn a phallic candle and to throw the remnants into a living body of water. "It was like the tradition of tashlich," says the actress, who converted to Judaism before her 1999 wedding.
Now she’s bringing her theme of female empowerment to a breast cancer benefit on Feb. 7 that will feature a "Kerouac" performance and Kerouac readings by Playboy bunnies. "These women are always doing stuff for guys, so I thought, ‘Let’s get them to do something for us,’" she says.
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