STAGE REVIEW : One Man’s ‘Little Stories’ Deliver Large Dose of Truth : Theater: David Cale takes your breath away on an unforgettable tour through the world of lost souls.

SAN DIEGO —  “I knew this man, and, when he died, he took a taxi through his old life and said, ‘Is this what intimidated me? Is this what held me back? Is this what kept me in check?’ ”

It takes your breath away when David Cale utters these words at the end of “Little Stories with Private Parts,” his one-man show at Sushi Performance Gallery (ending tonight).

That’s partly because, for the preceding hour and a half, he leads you from one painful/funny experience to another: the story of the boy trying desperately to free his birds, only to have them fly back into their cages; the story of the child running away from his mother who purposely frightens him with the squeak of her toothless gums in the dark; the story of the young man too fearful of telling the girl he loves that he loves her; the story of a woman who slowly allows herself to lose the man she loves because his manners embarrass her in front of her friends.

Standing vulnerably alone on stage, earnest eyes bugging out with wonder at passages that he seems to discover in the very act of telling the story, Cale’s silent assurance in each tale--be it but a sentence or a few pages long--is that this really happened; I felt it happen; this happened to me.

It’s all the more remarkable when you consider the shifting perspective from which they are told. Although Cale has described the show in advance as being told from one person’s point of view, his uncanny use of voices actually takes you seamlessly from the world of a man to that of a woman to that of a child.

It is this very enlarged perspective that lends a greater and quieter wisdom to this show than to his last one-man show at Sushi, “Redthroats,” a series of stories totally from one young man’s point of view. It is as if the British-born artist has broken through the prison of his own perspective and found a language that all lost souls--which is to say all souls--share.

As unclassifiable as his work seems to be--as performance art, theater, fiction or poetry (Cale refers to it as theatrical monologues)--it had the unmistakable ring of a long poem with the charged power that poetry had before modernists lost themselves in intellectual abstractions.

Like a poet, Cale, to borrow one of his more irresistible descriptions, creates a tightrope between his eyes and that of his audience, sending a little woman with an envelope across that wire to deliver messages so powerful that you have to turn your face away if you don’t want to take the envelope.

But beware. Inside the envelope are not homilies, but truths, as dangerous as picking up handfuls of broken glass. You may cut yourself handling the glass, but then, when Cale opens the window on a fresh insight, and the light starts streaming through your brain, you may very well overlook the pain for the pleasure of seeing the white light refract into so many gorgeous colors.

A few of Cale’s segments are about birds and a longing to fly (one is about a fear that birds will forget what they are doing and fall out of the sky). In some impassioned moments of his narrative, it is thrilling to see his arms, usually turned protectively inward at his sides, suddenly lift up so forcefully that you think for a moment he really is going to take flight. He does.

Don’t miss this show.

“LITTLE STORIES WITH PRIVATE PARTS”

Written, directed and performed by David Cale. At 8 p.m. today. Tickets are $7-$10. At 852 8th Ave., San Diego, (619) 235-8466.