STAGE REVIEWS : Anxiety of ‘No Place Like Home’

Shane McCabe looks as if he could play Santa Claus. He’s the right size and shape, and he has a reservoir of sympathy for children. All he needs is the white beard, to cover up the hurt and anxiety that fill his face.

The hurt caused the anxiety--McCabe was a victim of severe child abuse. Now, at 48, he has decided to tell the world about it, in a monologue at the Tiffany Theatre, “No Place Like Home.”

On opening night McCabe and director Mark Travis had not shaped “No Plance” into its proper theatrical form. (The show, which reportedly was being changed, plays Wednesdays only through Nov. 16.)

The venue is all wrong: A flashy theater, flat lighting, a silly set that was designed for a raunchy comedy that occupies the space on weekends. McCabe has brought in a model of the closet where he was often kept, and he has tacked up an illuminating drawing that he made when he was in therapy. But everything else about the set is distracting.

“No Place Like Home” is literally true in McCabe’s case; he had no place that he could recall fondly as “home.” So why not do the piece on a bare stage, using light to amplify the drama?

McCabe has shrewdly arranged his material so that he approaches the recollections of actual abuse slowly. He reveals an appreciation for irony, in the midst of the pain, and some of his stories are truly gut-grabbing. But they weren’t grabbing as tightly as they should have last Wednesday.

McCabe stumbled over too many words, and several anecdotes (a story about his aunt’s memory of an incident when Shane was 2, another about an encounter on a San Francisco elevator) were at least temporarily unclear.

A few incidents got short shrift, such as the oblique mentions of how young Shane had to wear long sleeves to hide cigarette burns. Other sections, such as McCabe’s account of adventures in Seattle during a temporary escape from home, went on for too long.

One central question went unanswered: What were his mother and brother doing and feeling while all of this was going on?

For that matter, what really drove his father to be so beastly? Perhaps it isn’t the responsibility of McCabe the victim to worry about that, but it is a responsibility of McCabe the dramatist. We got an inkling of information about the father’s own history, but not much of a sense that McCabe has spent a lot of time wrestling with the whys.

As a result, the monologue edged closer to therapy, farther away from drama--and we watched with clinical detachment, a feeling that was reinforced when McCabe summed up what he had learned with a hackneyed quote from a poet rather than with his own words.

The theater is at 8532 Sunset Blvd. Tickets: $10; (213) 652-6165.