Who's Your Daddy?

Nothing is more difficult than morphing into a dancing monkey to keep audiences entertained during a solo performance. The stakes increase dramatically when a performer has also written the material based on personal experience, making it even more important to keep the attention of those sitting in judgment. Luckily, actor-playwright Johnny O'Callaghan has two things going for him in his first solo show: the kind of infectious, authentic Irish accent that renders anything forgivable and the discovery of a formidable creative partner in director Tom Ormeny.

Every word of O'Callaghan's adventure is true, he tells his audience, from reliving his trip to Africa to participate in the filming of a documentary, to detailing his subsequent bureaucratic miseries back in the States after falling in love with a 3-year-old Ugandan orphan whose only word in English was "yes." The unexpected yet fiercely passionate notion to adopt this lad came at a critical period in O'Callaghan's life, a point when the struggling actor had a death wish to rival Sylvia Plath's. Adding to the usual paper-trail nightmare faced by any adoptive parent trying to rescue a child from Uganda was that O'Callaghan was not only a single man but a single gay man—and the kind of single gay man who always found the "most fucked-up person in the room" to add to his string of brief and disastrous obsessions.

But there's something about this kid, whom O'Callaghan optimistically renames Odin, that not only keeps him from giving up his windmill-chasing quest but in the process renews his faith in humanity and gives him new purpose. It is a charming yet often bitterly pessimistic chronicle of the actor's early life choices and familial trials—including hilarious transformative turns playing his own less-than-accepting parents in Ireland. In Ormeny's hands, however, O'Callaghan is remarkable as he begins, with relentlessly self-deprecating humor, by re-creating his self-destructive, unfocused pre-fatherhood existence, then blossoms into his role as a loving single parent at peace with himself and the world. And there's something incredibly heartwarming about O'Callaghan's program note, which dedicates the play to his son, Odin.

Presented by and at the Little Victory Theatre, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Nov. 11-Feb. 19. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m. (818) 841-5422. www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org.