Mary Kate O Flanagan Photo by Isibéal O’Connell

It's bare-bones, for sure: no credits for set (there is none), lighting (there is some, dimming and brightening for mood), sound (I think there's a mic somewhere, but the timbre's natural and unadorned), or costume. Not even a written script. All there is is O Flanagan (why no apostrophe?), roundish and curly-redheaded, extending a welcoming hand to a small audience. Her accent has an Irish lilt, but it's never unintelligible; you don't have to spend the first ten minutes attuning your ear to understand it, like I had to do the other night at Blackout Songs. She launches right into the first of what she tells us are going to be six autobiographical short stories, punctuated by ruminations on the essence of storytelling, its components, and its potency as a force for unifying humanity–and a dainty curtsey, to indicate that one tale is over and another about to begin. Then, as those in the audience giggle and infrequently gasp at some unexpected revelation, she proves her unifying-humanity thesis.

Each story, she explains, has a twist, and to depict that, she spins around. (The efforts of director Will O'Connell are practically invisible, as he and O Flanagan no doubt intended, but he does inject such occasional pieces of staging; they're welcome.) The first, about an ironic initial encounter with internet dating, introduces us to her best friend Jean, who will figure in later episodes. We also meet her five sisters, her loving mum, and a father, who sounds like a splendid guy. He limited the girls' TV viewing, she notes, unless there was a Fred Astaire or John Wayne movie on–equal representatives, to her eye, of American masculinity at its finest. Don't you love that?

A second anecdote deals with her first job, having relocated to London at 21, in a mostly male office where the lads seem nice enough but have nothing in common with her. Invited to a mandatory office party when she'd rather be out with her best buds to celebrate her birthday, she commits an outrageous conversational gaffe, then sees it ironically turn her into the life of the party. Favorable outcomes to tense situations is a recurring theme.

Her two most substantial stories, and the second one's the longest by far, both concern the O Flanagans' dealings with outsiders, a POW, and a refugee. The POW is German, confined to a remote town where Mary Kate's mother and grandmother live during wartime, and where her grandma rescues him from an abusive crowd and takes him home to tea. She helps him with his English, they bond, and there's a tear-inducing emotional payoff a generation later when the O Flanagans chance upon the soldier's family during a drive through Germany. The refugee is Sudanese, a 16-year-old at a detention center in Calais, where Mary Kate elects to volunteer and wages a successful six-month battle to grant him asylum in Ireland.

Here, too, the emotional bond intensifies, and the wonderful message is, small acts of kindness can generate exponential payback. You're bound to wonder if you would have the integrity and resolve to act as she did, and why more people don't. There's also a stirring account of how the O Flanagan girls handled their father's funeral, and a finale that answers a question we've been wondering the whole 75 minutes: Why hasn't this woman found a suitable partner? Spoiler: It's a happy answer.

"Story has become my religion," she says, and we are willing disciples. Making a Show of Myself does not, to put it kindly, employ many resources of the theatrical toolkit, and I remain no great fan of the solo-performer-yakking-at-us format. But this performer is unusually winning, and she sends the crowd out on notes of positivity and regard for our fellow humans. In such times, these are not to be discounted.