Charles
Isherwood

December 14, 2015

“Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my entire life terrified of getting pregnant,” says Staceyann Chin at the top of her solo show “MotherStruck!” Born in Jamaica, Ms. Chin grew up in fear of becoming a “statistic” like her mother: young and pregnant, with no father to help support her child. But the subject of this engaging and often funny stage memoir, which opened on Monday at the Culture Project, is not, in fact, Ms. Chin’s valiant efforts to stave off motherhood, but her increasingly strong desire for, and her difficulty in, actually achieving it. Ms. Chin has such a magnetic presence, with deep brown eyes that seem to give out light, that you might almost believe that she was unspooling her story for you alone, in your own living room or maybe hers. Wearing tights under a loose dress, her hair shaved on two sides, leaving a shock of red like an exclamation point in the middle, she bounds around the small, circular performance space with a wiry intensity. Nor does she confine herself to the stage: Often, the urgency of her story sends her flying out into the audience, or up the aisles at least.