Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, 23-year-old rising star Michael Feldman is the bisexual heir apparent to that royal line of Gotham-bred Jewish writer/actor/comic greats that have included Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and a whole slew of Catskills trained stand-up talent. Like a young Neil Simon, Michael has even written his own sort of Brighton Beach Memoirs theater work, entitled Jew Pain. This one-man show, in which Michael stars, tells the story of his own upbringing in an archetypal, conservative, middle-class Brooklyn Jewish family. Using parody, satire, inner reflection and slapstick, Jew Pain is Michael’s self-exploration of his ethnicity and sexual identity.

Here and there in Jew Pain, Michael even breaks into some hokey song & dance. Though not a major musical talent, he nonetheless throws himself into vaudevillian schtick with a truly Mel Brooksian effervescence and innocent abandonment. Jew Pain has enjoyed successful runs in Florida, Canada, Israel, San Francisco’s and New York City’s Fringe Festivals (where it was chosen as one of the top 25 Picks by Show Business Weekly), and most recently as part of the 2005 Fresh Fruit Festival in NYC.

To his credit, Michael has created a theatrical experience that not only entertains, but also raises awareness about societal and familial pressures regarding both sexual orientation and Jewish identity. It thus has great potential as a valuable cross cultural educational tool for teen groups, schools and colleges.

Feldman is also a writer and member of the Fresh Meat sketch comedy trio, in which he performs his own brand of off-the-wall multimedia comic satire regularly throughout the NYC comedy club circuit. Just as comedy writer Dick Van Dyke worked in TV-land for the Alan Brady Show, Michael has worked, in real life, behind the scenes, with television personality Jon Stewart on the award-winning TV program The Daily Show.

I caught up with Michael recently after seeing Jew Pain at the Blue Heron Theater in NYC, and one of his very funny and homoerotic skits from his Fresh Meat sketch comedy show at Manhattan’s Bowery Poetry Club.

AfterElton.com: In the two stage works I've seen you perform, both were written by you, and both are highly autobiographical. Can you give some thoughts and feelings on what it's like to throw your current, real-life circumstances (especially your personal experiences with exploring your sexual orientation) up on a stage for the whole world to see?
Michael Feldman: It's scary. Bottom line: to just go up on stage in front of a group of people and reveal my entire personal life, it's terrifying, but it's something I just needed to do. I didn't really give two thoughts to it. I developed Jew Pain (JP) when I was a student at NYU. My sophomore year there, I finally decided that I was bisexual, I came to terms with that fact for myself. Now was the difficult part--how do I come out to everyone I know? I honestly had no idea how, so instead I just wrote a show and came out through that.

But humor is extremely important to me. I knew if I was going to do this show that I needed it to be comedic. I needed everyone to laugh along with me as I revealed myself on stage, otherwise I'm not sure I could've done it.