Getting people to talk about themselves is easy. But having the New York Times write a half page expose on your history, talents and exploits definitely takes more than the gift of gab or a talented publicist. So, we have to give props to Iris Bahr, the young Israeli- American writer and performer of the play “Dai”, who the NYT profiled last week.

You may recognize the writer, actor, neuropsychologist from her hilarious role as the uptight Orthodox girl sitting next to Larry David on the ski lift in Curb Your Enthusiasm…

So Many Different People to Be, Onstage and Off, if She Can Dodge the Trucks

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Iris Bahr’s résumé reads as if it were pasted together from the résumés of a bunch of people who have never met.

At one point she’s working for Israeli intelligence; then she’s the author of a memoir about, among other things, her attempts to lose her virginity. Here she is playing opposite Larry David on television; here she is playing opposite Larry the Cable Guy in a movie. Oh, and here is Ms. Bahr studying neuropsychology at Brown University.

Along with all this Ms. Bahr, who is in her early 30s, has written a one-woman, 11-character show, “Dai (Enough),” which is now playing at the Culture Project’s new headquarters at 55 Mercer Street in SoHo. (It opened in November to good reviews at the Culture Project’s former headquarters on Bleecker Street.)

“Dai” takes place at a cafe in Tel Aviv. The characters, all of whom are introduced minutes before they become casualties of a suicide bombing, include a young American in the Israeli army, a snooty Israeli expatriate who lives in Manhattan, a Palestinian professor, an American actress and a militant West Bank settler.

It is practically a law that anyone who has written a solo show with several distinctive characters must say, in some variation, “The characters are really different aspects of my own life.” Over a large bowl of hummus at a nondescript Israeli restaurant on the Lower East Side, Ms. Bahr mercifully said nothing of the kind. But with a background like hers, she certainly had claim to.

Where do you even start? One day you’re performing brain scans in a lab at a top school; a few years later you’re sitting on a ski lift with Mr. David in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” What’s the career arc there?

“I was in Israel for a year, my junior year,” said Ms. Bahr, who speaks in a rat-a-tat-tat and can go from serious to sarcastic to self-deprecating to serious in four sentences flat. “I was doing cancer research with rats, psycho-biology stuff. And I didn’t do any acting there, and I realized there was a void. When I came back to Brown, I did much more acting. And then I moved to New York. And then I got hit by a truck.”

A truck.

“Yeah, I was on my way back from clown class.”

And bam, you’re back where you started, which is to say, you have even more little puzzle pieces that don’t seem to go together.

Much about Ms. Bahr can be learned in her gracefully titled memoir, “Dork Whore: My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin” (Bloomsbury). The subtitle cannot be fully explained here, nor can her unpleasant experience in the audience at a Bangkok sex show, nor her exquisitely detailed gastrointestinal troubles, nor her repeated attempts to bring to an end her pseudo-virginal status.

But there is plenty else about her in the book, which is due out in March. She grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, going to an Orthodox school but living in a secular household with her Israeli parents. After her parents divorced (the book mentions a mistress, an unpleasant break-up), Ms. Bahr, then 13, moved with her mother to Israel.

After serving two years in the army (intelligence, she says; “can’t really talk about it”), Ms. Bahr took the trip that would become the memoir. And after that, Brown, for the brain science.

“I’ve always been fascinated by human psychology,” she said. “I like the emotional manifestation of people, people’s behaviors, but I also love the organic roots of that behavior, which part of the brain does this and that.”

Acting, though, was her preferred science, so after school she moved to New York and enrolled in the Actors Center Conservatory (which includes a class on clowning). That aforementioned truck, one of those big, green city Parks Department numbers, was taking a left onto Great Jones Street when it knocked Ms. Bahr off her bicycle, into the hospital and, after some soul-searching, out to Los Angeles, where her acting and comedy career took off.

And now there’s “Dai,” which is quite funny in parts but not the kind of thing you’d expect from the author of her book.

“I was surprised,” said Allan Buchman, the artistic director of the Culture Project, who said he was expecting something from Ms. Bahr that showcased her quick wit and keen sense of humor.

“Dai,” which Ms. Bahr said was never intended to be a polemic, is nonetheless about an inherently political — and serious — topic.

Mr. Buchman said he knew of a Palestinian acquaintance who walked out after simply reading Ms. Bahr’s program notes. But, he added: “I do think there’s enough in this play that intelligent people can have a conversation about it without feeling that we’re waving the Israeli flag. I think it is really a product of her trying to comes to terms with some of the questions that her life has posed.”

Ms. Bahr’s own views of the conflict, she said, are mixed, though her perspective is obviously an Israeli one.

“No one’s going to come in and say, ‘Oh my God, that’s such an elaborate concept on peace in the Middle East,’ ” she said. “I had a specific desire to make it a very visceral emotional experience.”

Her memories of the precarious day-to-day existence that she wrote about go back to the first gulf war, when air-raid sirens forced her to stay inside and play Monopoly for hours. It’s not the only part of her life in Israel that stamped her; when she talks about the uncertainty of fitting in, as an American in Israel, it goes a long way toward explaining those seemingly incongruous multitudes — scientist and artist, secular and Orthodox — that somehow add up to her biography.

“I’d study really hard, but then I’d hitch rides with complete strangers and go to this little place called the Penguin in Tel Aviv and listen to punk rock,” she said, describing her high school experience. “I think I’m a contradiction in a lot of ways.”

“Dai (Enough)” is at the Culture Project, 55 Mercer Street, at Broome Street, SoHo, (212) 253-9983.