Backstage: Paul Scott Goodman and the rebirth of 'Son of a Stand Up Comedian'

Quadruple threat Paul Scott Goodman, singer-songwriter-scriptwriter-jokester, shambles over to a little cafe table at MetroStage. He's performing his solo show "Son of a Stand Up Comedian" there through May 9. Goodman did the music and lyrics and co-wrote the script with his wife, Miriam Gordon.

Sipping a Scotch on the rocks after a Sunday matinee, he explains that the funny little song he just performed as an encore, all about his need for an audience, is titled "The Ham Song" and originated in "God Save the New Wave," an early show of his and Gordon's.

The 52-year-old Goodman, a Scottish Jew whose burr remains intact (though peppered with Yiddishisms), grew up in Glasgow, the son of a "semi"-professional stand-up comic who played bar mitzvahs on weekends and worked in the clothing business on weekdays. Goodman came to New York in the early 1980s, where he met and married Gordon. They now have two daughters in college, a 15-year-old son and a double-size apartment in SoHo. Their punk-inspired show, "Rooms: A Rock Romance," played at MetroStage in 2008, earning six Helen Hayes nominations, including a win for co-star Natascia Diaz. The show went on to a well-received off-Broadway run in spring 2009.

The rock 'n' ready female character in "Rooms," despite her gender, is based on Goodman's youthful self, he explains. But he calls the show "more surface," while "Son of a Stand Up Comedian" "delves a bit deeper."

"Comedian" began life in 1990 under the title "Tiny Dancer," which, with props to Elton John, was the nickname Goodman and Gordon gave to their first child. Goodman has performed the piece intermittently since then, and revised and retitled it for MetroStage. It recounts, mostly in song and on guitar, his early struggles to break into the theater, how he met Gordon while he was still in another marriage, how they wed and started a family, and how he forged ahead in his career.

In "The N Train," a song near the end of the show, Goodman recalls how he used to visit his late mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor. In the song, he fantasizes about taking the subway to see her and encountering her relatives who had died in the camps. Goodman says he tries to keep the digression "slightly fantastical" rather than somber. "The idea of writing a show about having a child whose grandmother survived the Holocaust is interesting. What better way for a Jew really to spit in the face of Hitler . . . It's the greatest triumph."

Goodman says he'd love to have a song used in a movie or be in a movie himself, but mainly, "I just want to build a body of work -- of musicals. That's my goal."

Among other projects, Goodman says he's working on an original musical, "Alive in the World." He calls it "a post-9/11 New York love story thing."

CATF's new season

"It's going to be one of those things that people sit there and squirm a little bit," Ed Herendeen says with a hint of glee. The artistic director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival is referring to "White People" by J.T. Rogers, one play in this summer's repertory to be performed by Equity casts on the campus of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va. The festival's 20th season will run July 9-Aug. 1, with pay-what-you-can previews July 7 and 8 (http://www.catf.org).

That "squirm-a-little" factor ranks high with Herendeen, who often chooses plays with a political or social edge. "White People" was first done about 10 years ago, but has been recently revised and produced off-Broadway. Herendeen, who'll direct, says the piece shows that "whenever even good people attempt to talk about race, they screw it up."

Domestic fallout from the war on terror underlies "Lidless" by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, which Herendeen will also stage. A female American veteran is visited by a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner on whom she had used "enhanced interrogation."

Jennifer Haley's "Breadcrumbs" depicts an aging writer who asks her caregiver to help finish her autobiography. Laura Kepley will direct.

Herendeen will direct "Inana" by Michele Lowe, in which a Baghdad museum curator at the start of the Iraq war devises a way to save an ancient statue.

"The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show" will be the lone musical, with book and lyrics by Max Baker and music by frequent CATF actor Lee Sellars. The two men are part of the Eeelwax Jesus Show, a band in New York that fuses music, theater and a touch of the avant-garde. In a Big Brotherish near-future society, residents of a group home watch the "Eelwax Jesus Show" on TV, but the performers suddenly appear live. "We're choosing to call it an alternative musical," says Herendeen.

Both "Eelwax Jesus" and "Breadcrumbs" are world premieres.

Horwitz is a freelance writer.