Symphonic Slices of Life

In Dominic Hoffman’s delightfully sassy, funny and poignant one-man show, “Uncle Jacques’ Symphony,” at Stages Theatre Center, he attempts to capture short measures of ordinary people’s lives. Their complex patterns of sounds and sighs are the “song of humanity.”

Claiming that “jazz musicians try to play the impossible,” that they chase after “the terrific tune called life,” Hoffman introduces us to his Uncle Jacques, a jazz drummer who “spoke with his hands.” As Jacques and assorted other characters, Hoffman speaks with his hands, his body and a voice that easily changes inflections from the woman-wise young man lecturing on proper courtship behavior to the light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in love with a dark-skinned man and facing her family’s displeasure.

With minimal costume changes and props but elegantly effective lighting by Kent Inasy, Hoffman conducts us through seemingly incongruent lives. There’s an intellectually rude painter--an older man who mournfully still sees women through a young man’s eyes.

From her kitchen, a mother contemplates the wildness of her son, remembering also his love for baseball. We meet a boxer whose terrible future is foreshadowed in his memory lapses. Yet this small tragedy is followed by a bookie, the only white person present at a funeral, giving a hysterical eulogy for his pal, a drug pusher.

These sketches are short riffs of young braggadocio and joy, courage and love, sorrow and grief. Hoffman’s lyrical direction of his own words sometimes brings together the strands of thought in intriguingly unexpected ways.

The end comes too soon, signaled by Billy Mitchell’s original and fitting music.

BE THERE

“Uncle Jacques’ Symphony,” Stages Theatre Center, 1540 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 17. $15. (323) 465-1010. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.