Award–winning performer Tracey Erin Smith is living proof that art imitates life.

Having dreamt as a little girl of one day becoming a rabbi and a performer, this Cabbagetown resident is now the playwright and star of The Burning Bush!, a one-woman show about a stripping rabbi. The show opens June 18 in Toronto for a two-week run at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in the Distillery District.

While Smith describes The Burning Bush! as “Yentil meets Showgirls,” the play’s content is not what it may seem; there is no nudity and, Smith admits, its message isn’t really about Judaism. “You don’t have to be Jewish for this show,” she says. “The story is about finding your own way and how sometimes, you have to create a path for yourself that never existed.”

Born and raised in Toronto by a singing and acting mother, Smith had performing encoded in her DNA and landed her first gig in a diaper commercial when she was only six months old. Later in life, she continued to pursue her acting dreams and graduated from the Claude Watson High School for the Performing Arts, followed by three years of studying theatre at McGill University in Montreal and three years at Studio 58 in Vancouver.

With nine years of studying performance art under her belt, Smith found work after graduation as a professional actress but it wasn’t as rewarding as she had hoped. “I kept wondering, ‘Is this all there is?’ It wasn’t exactly what I wanted,” she says. With her childhood desire to become a rabbi lingering in the back of her mind, she returned to Toronto where she started to develop a show about a girl who is expelled from rabbinical school and discovers she can offer spiritual guidance while pole dancing at a strip club.

But she didn’t do it all on her own—Smith had some encouragement from her idol, comedian Jackie Mason. Smith had no only written Mason as a character in the show but he was also the inspiration for the original title, “I Want to Marry Jackie Mason.”

While Mason was in Toronto on tour, Smith attended his performance and sent a card to him backstage informing him of her play to which he was the namesake and, intrigued, he set up a meeting to ask why she had chosen him as a role model. “It’s a really special moment in life to look into the face of a mentor and tell him why you think he’s so great,” she recalls. “I said, ‘You used to be a rabbi and then went into comedy,’ and now he has what I would call the world largest congregation, except it’s on Broadway instead of in a synagogue. I told him the show was really about rediscovering religion and finding a way that it’s actually relevant to our lives today. He said, ‘Go write this show. It’s going to be a hit.’”

And he was right. Since then, Smith has performed The Burning Bush! all across Canada and in New York. Originally written in two parts, The Burning Bush! and Two in the Bush!, Smith has won two Best of the Fringe Awards in Toronto and two Audience Choice Awards at the Frigid Festival in New York City. It was also chosen for Critic's Pick in New York’s Backstage Magazine. Before its two-week run in Toronto this month, Smith will return to New York to perform the show in The Festival of Jewish theatre.

Now, Smith has also found a rewarding career in teaching the performing arts and writing as an instructor at Ryerson University’s Act II Studio, Second City and privately. She also designs courses for companies such as Wal-Mart that teach English-as-a-second-language employees how to improve their customer service and communication skills through theatre techniques. She is also working towards her dreams of becoming a rabbi and is currently enrolled in rabbinical school. As for the future, Smith hopes to adapt the play to the big screen and has already completed the script along with a signed letter from Jackie Mason agreeing to play himself.

The Burning Bush! runs June 18 to June 27 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, Tank House, in the Distillery District.