STAGE REVIEW : Storyteller Cuts Deep to the Heart : Monologue: David Cale weaves magic as he takes his audience inside the dreams, longings and frustrations of 10 people in a single-room- occupancy hotel.

David Cale, on his fifth visit to Sushi Performance Art Gallery, proves again that he is more than a spellbinding storyteller.

He is a guide to crashing rivers inside people’s hearts, minds and souls. He gives words to previously unarticulated thoughts, feelings, gestures. He doesn’t judge. But he lays bare the deadly effects of loneliness, repression, bigotry and hate with quiet eloquence.

In his latest series of monologues, “Somebody Else’s House,” Cale takes you into the minds of 10 boarders in a London SRO (single-room-occupancy hotel).

He never tells you he’s going to do that, of course.

Instead, Cale becomes each of these people: an Irish alcoholic who was thrown out by his wife for drinking and now ruminates about the relationship between God and the devil in the universe, a white girl who rejects her bigoted parents to fall in love with a black man and in turn rejects him for reasons she cannot understand, the gay man so afraid of embarrassing others that he lives in the world as if he were living in “somebody else’s house.”

What all these characters have in common is that they live in constricted little rooms in the hotel and are struggling--sometimes violently, sometimes self-destructively--to break out of their constricted little lives.

The story of Sissy is particularly poignant. Sissy is a nickname, but he doesn’t consider the obvious meaning of the name and takes it instead as a reference to Sissy Spacek in “Badlands.” He refers to his father as “the photograph” (because soon he is going to leave them and become a photograph on the wall) and his mother as “the unhappy woman who insists she was related.”

Sissy befriends a duck. But “the photograph” takes the duck away and sends it to live on a farm with chickens. After a while, the duck thinks of himself as a chicken and forgets how to fly. This drives Sissy crazy because it’s clear that Sissy sees himself as a duck among chickens. He has to escape and ultimately does, driving to the farm and reclaiming his duck--but not before fulfilling the dark side of his nickname and burning down his home as the character in “Badlands” did.

There are no special effects in this show. Cale himself is not an arresting figure. He dresses simply, in jeans, a black T-shirt and black sneakers. His thin, scraggly hair is balding at the top. But when he speaks, his movements, his demeanor, his accent and the timbre of his voice establish the uniqueness of each role, and you cannot take your eyes off him.

Cale’s artistry is subtle, not just in the individual pieces but in the barely visible way he stitches them together. He makes his show a whole by beginning and ending with the same character--who seems to be a stand-in for himself, the teller of these stories.

But instead of doing that character as he does the others, he takes on a childlike voice, called Qui Qui, inside the teller of tales. Qui Qui conveys the child/spirit/soul inside the man.

As Qui Qui tells it in the opening monologue, the man she inhabits is so frightened and foolish, she longs to escape him. But by the end of the evening, Qui Qui returns to tell us that the man has developed the courage to be himself, which fills her with a measure of hope, pride and anticipation.

There is no reason given for this man’s sudden courage; one can only credit his having learned something from all the stories that have gone before. Subtly, Cale is telling us that art--the telling and sharing of tales--can reclaim a life.

The show, commissioned by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, is billed as a workshop production. It’s hard to imagine how Cale could improve on it.

“SOMEBODY ELSE’S HOUSE”

Written and performed by David Cale. Lighting by Ron Vodicka. Taped music by Nina Simone. Technical coordinator is Suann Pauley. Performances at 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, through Sept. 27. Tickets are $8-$12. At Sushi Performance Gallery, 852 8th Ave., San Diego. 235-8466.