‘Shalom, my brothers,” Rain Pryor greets her audience — and if that sounds incongruous coming from a woman in a large Afro, well, that’s the point.
As “Fried Chicken and Latkes” shows us, growing up as the daughter of Richard Pryor and a Jewish former go-go dancer was nothing if not schizophrenic.
You can easily sense her father’s DNA, if not his comedy genius, in this one-woman show, punctuated though it is with such Yiddishisms as tuchas and meshugah. Or, as she tells us at one point, “Kibitz amongst yourselves.”
Growing up in Beverly Hills, she recalls her father as devoted if often absent, distracted both by his blazing career and a drug habit that ultimately left him blazing as well — severely burned in a freebasing incident that she pointedly says was not an accident.
But her tone is forgiving.
“I don’t think my dad could have been a father and a genius at the same time,” she says.
Her amusing impressions of both her Jewish and black grandmothers recall the codgers in her father’s old stand-up act. But her re-creation of his classic routine about shooting his car, while spot-on, seems merely obligatory. Much better is a more personal bit in which she lovingly imitates him, enfeebled by multiple sclerosis, berating her for trying to sneak out of the house.
Pryor has a wealth of anecdotes to draw from — after all, how many other children were lulled to sleep by Miles Davis playing a lullaby on trumpet? — but this barely hourlong show doesn’t delve very deeply into its themes, racial or otherwise. And the musical selections, in which she sings numbers ranging from “Kol Nidre” to a Billie Holiday impression of “God Bless the Child” accompanied by a three-piece jazz band — seem like padding.
But it’s often moving nonetheless, especially in a poignant account of her father’s 2005 funeral, which she says was shockingly ill-attended: Save for Diana Ross, few of Pryor’s show-business friends bothered to show up.
Intimate moments like those are when “Fried Chicken and Latkes” is at its most satisfying.