The Goal: To Get Audiences to See Beyond ‘Appearances’

Paula Weston Solano is a special combination--a lively performer with solid writing ability. Those twin talents are on ample display in “Appearances,” Solano’s well-crafted solo show at the Met.

Largely a series of interlocking monologues, the play is an eclectic sampling from the lives of a half-dozen or so Asian women characters. Some, such as first-generation Chinese immigrant Mabel and daughter Joann, are related by blood. Others, like high-powered businesswoman Jenny and lovelorn schoolteacher Bonnie, Joann’s daughter, come together purely by circumstance.

Jenny and Bonnie meet and part. Mabel and Joann part, too, but under more painful circumstances. In most cases, the poignancy is balanced by humor, or vice versa. Kicks, a Vietnamese American homegirl, may wind up addicted, pregnant and jilted, but she conquers drugs and delivers a healthy baby--along with a hilarious monologue about the experience of labor. Jenny, an Asian Martha Stewart with an adenoidal cackle, starts off as a comic stereotype, but evolves into a fully fleshed individual who is only beginning to see her career’s adverse effects on her children. Whatever the women’s connection, the intricacies of their relationships are so ably mapped in Solano’s writing that they are never confusing.

The same cannot always be said of Solano’s performance, which ranges from the broad to the underplayed. Occasionally, characters are so over the top that they seem lifted from a comedy sketch. At other times, they are subtle to the point of the blurred. There’s also a late-breaking subplot about the elderly Mabel’s lesbianism that directly goes nowhere.

But those flaws are pebbles in the rich flow of narrative. Under the guidance of director and dramaturge Jessica Kubzansky, Solano is gripping and graceful and very funny--a storyteller of stature and depth.

*

* “Appearances,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., L.A. Sundays, 2 p.m.; Mondays, 8 p.m. Closes July 9. $12. (323) 242-4290. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.