STAGE REVIEW : A Re-Creation of Childhood Abuse in ‘Home’

Shane McCabe, chubby and a bit rumpled, materializes on stage with the visage of an anxious cherub. It is an apt image but it is no act.

McCabe was an abused child, and for nearly two hours in his devastating solo flight, “No Place Like Home” at the Santa Monica Playhouse, he re-creates his childhood holocaust.

Broken ribs, welts, smashed teeth and cigarette burns seem the least of the damage. Psychological horror piles on horror until you are left stupefied and finally cleansed by young McCabe’s resilience and unbreakable spirit.

Don’t let the material mislead you. The nightmare odyssey--which covers McCabe from the age of 2 until he runs away from home at 17, ending with a postscript about his adult recovery--dramatizes the power of a youth’s imagination to enable him to prevail.

McCabe alternates the narrative by jumping into the diction and behavior of his childhood years. Strapped to a post in the basement, he choreographs dance routines in his head from having watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. Another time, imprisoned in his attic, he teaches himself to type by poking fingers in the dust on the bare floor.

For seven years he’s forced to sleep in his closet, where he builds splints to set his broken fingers. He goes to public schools but doesn’t dare tell anyone of his suffering because his mother has told him he’ll go to an orphanage if he does.

Ultimately, for this kind of personal storytelling to work as theater, it must be disciplined, shaped, free of self-pity, with people and places that have the slap of credulity. “No Place Like Home,” which is set in the ‘40s and ‘50s, triumphs on all counts.

McCabe even enriches his horrid world with the vivid sense of smell. His millhand father’s constant stench of sawdust and body odor and his cannery-worker mother’s fish smell linger in the familial ooze.

McCabe opened “No Place Like Home” (Dorothy’s line in “The Wizard of Oz”) on the set of another show last fall at the Tiffany Theatre. Now McCabe and director Mark W. Travis (who also staged Paul Linke’s self-revealing “Time Flies When You’re Alive”) enjoy enhanced production values from James Cooper’s varied lighting design, Lynn Yamaha’s musical sound design, and Timothy Chadwick’s spare but telling set.

McCabe has also rewritten his script, fleshing out the characters of his sociopathic father, his inept mother and his older brother, both of whom also lived in terror of the father.

This spring McCabe, 48, who is a successful television character actor, will launch a North American tour of his show to colleges and universities, starting with Vancouver. Proceeds, he said, will go to child-abuse centers in those cities.