David Cale Has a New Story to Tell: His Own

“Watching him, it’s still really inspiring,” his collaborator, Mr. Marsh, said, speaking by telephone. “In a way it’s a feel-good show.” He paused. “In a way, it’s just not,” he said.

In 2017, Mr. Cale performed a work-in-progress version at the New Stages festival at Chicago’s Goodman Theater. He imagined audience members saying, “Why did you put us through that? We don’t go to the theater to be tortured.” But no one complained. Instead Mr. Falls, the Goodman Theater’s artistic director, came to him, in tears, and asked to direct it, aiming it for the Goodman’s main stage, where it opened last September, after a quick run at the Public’s Under the Radar Festival.

In telling the truth of his parents’ marriage and his own mangled adolescence, Mr. Cale has left some things out, like the way the tabloids savaged his mother after her death, like his father’s subsequent criminality. And he has allowed himself a few inventions.

The extraordinary stuff? It all happened. The murder, the trial, the hundreds of birds kept in aviaries in the backyard. But other sections are imagined, like the love interest he supplies for his mother and a thrilling ride on the back of that man’s motorbike. He figured his mother deserved some joy. Some good songs, too.

Mr. Cale sings all those songs and he plays all the parts. If you’re new to his world, that might seem unlikely. That afternoon at the Public, Mr. Cale wore a version of his costume, a collared shirt in some inconsequential shade and skinny jeans that he was possibly too skinny for. He didn’t look like anyone’s mother. But onstage, when he becomes Barbara — or his father, his grandfather, his younger brother — his face and body recede. Another person seems to stand there.

Mr. Falls compared this onstage experience to an “odd séance.” Mr. Cale didn’t exactly disagree. If he thinks that channeling is too pretentious a word for what he does, he doesn’t have a better one.

He knows that “We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time” can’t bring his mother back, can’t right the wrongs done to her, can’t wrest the hammer from his father’s hand. He knows it eight shows a week. But on a good night, he senses his mother in the room, or even closer. “It does just feel like she’s inside me,” he said. “It’s quite, quite a wild feeling.”