One-person shows are always a test of both the performer and the audience. Can this actor tell a story and capture an audience's attention for ninety minutes with no help? Can one, as an audience member, lose oneself in a story when it's being told by a single person, perhaps in multiple voices? The answer to both of those questions, in the case of the newest Berkeley Rep production Black N Blue Boys/Broken Men, written and performed by Dael Orlandersmith, is yes. But it's still a rough ninety minutes to stomach.

That may be a compliment to Orlandersmith's ability both as writer and interpreter of her work — there is no denying she is a compelling person to listen to and watch. As a solo performer, you want to keep watching her. She cut her teeth on the slam poetry scene in New York in the 90s, and with her play Yellowman (2002) she became a respected member of the theater community too, earning raves and becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. Berkeley Rep audiences never got to see Orlandersmith on stage, however, because though she originally played one of the two leads in the original New York production of the play, she did not appear in the 2004 production here, which remains burned in the minds of many subscribers and loyal fans of the theater as one of the best productions in Berkeley Rep history.

Now we get to see her play a half dozen characters, all male, who one way or another have had their lives and their personalities broken by abuse. She moves easily between the voices of a Hispanic teenager named Flaco from Coney Island whose mentally ill mother forced him to have sex with her at age 12 and who subsequently became a homeless hustler; an Irish man educated in England, abused by an alcoholic father, who later becomes a trader on Wall Street but can not hold on to a relationship; an African-American man trying to be a writer whose mother called him a "trick baby" because he was conceived in one of her moments of prostitution; an eleven-year-old boy whose mother becomes a junkie and whose baby sister ends up accidentally ingesting heroin; and an elderly New York man named Isaac who watches a young boy grow up playing football in Central Park and getting abused and roughed up by his older brother. Orlandersmith masters these voices and their various inflections well, and the stories she tells from each of these characters' lives are shocking, painful, and at times moving.

The set by Daniel Ostling, a simple but striking island of hard-wood floor, broken at the edges like it's floating in space after a tornado, with seven simple lamps hanging over the stage, works well.

Ultimately, though, whether it is a fault of the direction by Chay Yew or the limits of Orlandersmith herself as a performer, we were left somewhat unmoved. Movement, in fact, is one of Orlandersmith's weaknesses. She is a master of voices, but not so much gesture or the subtleties of a person's linguistic tics, and her presence on stage is often fairly static. (We found ourselves, probably unfairly, comparing her to the wonder that is Anna Deveare Smith doing some similar, but superior, character acrobatics in her recent one-woman show.) Don't get us wrong: She conjures various forms of masculine energy extremely well. But we were pulled out of scenes too often, reminded of her presence as a performer, as opposed to living within the space of the play undistracted.

And again, this is a play about abuse, and the impacts on the abused. It makes you want to give up drinking, volunteer at a shelter, or get really drunk and try to forget some of these painful tales. They're real. They're hurtful. They are both cathartic, and exhausting. It's up to you if you can handle it.

Black N Blue Boys/Broken Men plays through June 24 on the Thrust stage. Get tickets here, and if you're under 30, you can get a discount by ordering over the phone.