Several years ago, performer, director, and producer Iris Bahr wrote two colourful memoirs. The first, Dork Whore: My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin, shared zany tales of backpacking across Asia. The second, Machu, My Picchu: Searching for Sex, Sanity, and a Soul Mate in South America, covered her sometimes dangerous travels through Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.
Now, she’s drawing upon some of these adventures and other life experiences for her one-woman show, Stories from the Brink: My Festive Near-Death Adventures. She will perform it on Wednesday (March 19) to open the five-day Chutzpah! Plus Spring Edition in Vancouver.
“They are stories from the brink—and festive—because I make them festive,” Bahr tells the Toronto Spark over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. “Obviously, there are tragic moments and there are comedic moments. I always find the comedy in the tragedy.”
Along with authoring books, Bahr has devised and performed critically acclaimed solo shows. In Dai, she played 11 characters in a Tel Aviv café moments before a suicide bomber enters. This earned her a Lucille Lortel Award in 2008. Bahr adapted one of those characters, Russian madam and political consultant Svetlana, for a TV series, which she also directed. Then there is her famously mulleted southern American podcaster named Rae Lynn Casper White.
“I was in Israel and I had no costume,” Bahr recalls. “I had a mullet wig that I just had never used, and I said, ‘Let me roam the streets with my mullet wig and a bottle of beer, and my pregnancy belly out there for the world to admire.’ And that’s how Rae Lynn was born.”
But Bahr is probably most famous for her recurring role as the Orthodox Jewish woman named Rachel Heinemann on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
“I owe a lot to Curb—it has opened a lot of doors,” she says.
Watch Iris Bahr’s comedy reel (above).
Bahr plans a series of vignettes
She describes Stories from the Brink as a series of vignettes from her life. All of the stories are true.
“Some of the anecdotes are actually stuff that’s also in my books, but then I bring it all together” Bahr says. “It’s kind of framed also by my experience in Israel on October 7.”
She was in Tel Aviv when Hamas and other militant groups crossed over from Gaza and murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel on that day in 2023. They seized another 240 civilians as hostages. As the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history unfolded, Bahr’s son was camping on the beach just north of Gaza.
“It was an extremely horrifying morning and day,” Bahr recalls. “And obviously, we’re all still kind of reeling from everything, compounded by more and more things every day.”
She insists that her artistic output is never political. Rather, she says that her shows are really about humanity.
“I hope my pieces reach a wide range of audiences to open people’s eyes and, again, to see the common humanity in all of us,” Bahr states. “I hate to sound cheesy and like a T-shirt, but that’s how I feel.”
Her dad is a retired banker and her mother was a university registrar. They both have Bulgarian Jewish ancestry.
“I talk about Bulgarian Jews being the most secular of Eastern European Jews to the point where, after World War II, my dad’s family moved to Israel so they could live freely and openly as Jews,” Bahr deadpans. “They put my dad in a Jesuit school. So, that’s how Jewish they were.”
From brain research to the stage
She was born in the Bronx where she learned Hebrew at a Jewish school. Then at the age of 12, Bahr moved to Israel with her mother after her parents split up.
“I was always a little comedian, even as a kid, doing bits for guests,” she says.
But it didn’t come without some tragedy within the family. Bahr’s older brother, now deceased, was severely autistic to the point where he was nonverbal. She concedes that watching him—and feeling heartbroken over this—probably helps explain her keen interest in the human brain. Bahr studied neuropsychology at Brown University. She also conducted brain research at Stanford and the UCLA brain mapping centre before shifting to acting and writing.
Later, she became a caregiver after her mother suffered a stroke and developed dementia.
These days, Bahr helps other artists develop their own one-person shows. Her first principle is that these performances must be entertaining.
“This cannot be a therapy session for you on-stage,” Bahr declares.
However, she adds, it can be therapeutic for the audience. But this can only occur it doesn’t come across as the storyteller working out their own issues.
“You have to provide a piece of art that illuminates aspects of the human condition and finds universal experiences through your specific lens,” Bahr advises. “That, to me, is worthy of a one-person show.”
Iris Bahr will present Stories from the Brink: My Festive Near-Death Adventures at 7 p.m. on Wednesday (March 19) at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre. It opens Chutzpah! Plus Spring Edition 2025, which runs from March 19 to 23. For tickets and more information, visit ChutzpahFestival.com. Learn more about the communities that make up Canada on the Toronto Spark website. Follow Charlie Smith on Bluesky @charliesmithvcr.bsky.social. The Toronto Spark is also on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
