Except for Mark Jackson, ACT, and a bushel of other playhouses we’re totally forgetting, sometimes it’s hard to find theatrical events in San Francisco that hit hard without leaning on antagonizing political bullshit or outrageousness in sequins. Carlo D’Amore’s hyper and “semi-autobiographical” No Parole does just that. Why? Well, it’s got cocaine! It’s got a Peruvian diva-like matriarch! It’s got riches-to-rags immigrants! It’s got a faultless one-man performance! It’s got the disenfranchised and the gays, which in lesser hands might result in preaching to the Bay Area choir, but refuses to exploit said topics, and thank God.

At an efficient 90 minutes, Peruvian-born D’Amore seamlessly breaks down (in more ways than one) his trajectory from wide-eyed, Italian/Latin-American kid in 1980s Peru to neurotic adult living with his too-brilliant yet too-flawed jailbird of a mother. Relentlessly performing a kilo-load of characters (almost a nod to the Pulitzer-injected I Am My Own Wife), D’Amore’s manic hour-plus command of the floorboards is reason enough to catch this simple tale of an extraordinary and extraordinarily unhappy family. Although humorous and cheeky in parts, it gets pretty damn bleak towards the end. But we like that, and so will you; My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish and I'm in Therapy , thankfully, this is not.

Joseph Megel directs. The show starts at 8 p.m. (Thursday-Saturday, closing on July 28) at SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter (at Powell); admission is $20.