THEATER REVIEW : Solo Works Marked by Earnest Innocence

Third-generation Chinese-American Canyon Sam was born in San Francisco and raised in Fresno. After a California psychic said, “Tibet is completely lit up for you,” Sam searched for her true identity in China, her ancestral homeland.

A year later, Sam returned home as a performance artist.

“I went to China looking for the truth of my ancestors,” she explained Thursday night at Highways. “I found it in Tibet.”

That trip took place back in 1986, when Sam was already 30, a late start for a performance career. But Sam shrewdly transforms her acting limitations into an advantage during two brief solo works, “Taxi Karma” and “The Dissident.” Rather than razzle-dazzle technique, she projects an earnest innocence in a willfully naive style. Such unpretentious candor makes her Tibetan-rights activism sincerely compelling.

But it doesn’t make Sam a gifted writer. Her playwriting flaws are particularly evident in “Taxi Karma.” Here Sam resembles an excited tourist entertaining her parents by mimicking a wild cab ride through Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s Indian home-in-exile.

In “The Dissident,” Sam describes a far more serious visit to that Indian city. Motivated by a side trip to Tibet during her year abroad, Sam returned to Asia, this time as a human rights activist. She interviewed a Buddhist nun, “in her early 20s with dark fear in her eyes,” tortured by Chinese soldiers.

Employing the most minimal of props--five aluminum buckets, a metal chair, a small rug--Sam poignantly re-creates the nun’s horrific imprisonment by “Orwellian people.” Her ingenuous delivery perfectly mates with the nun’s gentle innocence.

* “ Taxi Karma” and “The Dissident, “ Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. 8:30 tonight only. $10. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 90 minutes.