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The San Diego-bred Dark is a fixture on the international lesbian performance scene. But instead of the taboo-busting exhilaration that makes the gay-themed writing of Holly Hughes or Reno so refreshingly original, Dark's new piece feels like a fireside chat with a motherly prof in a women's studies program, circa 1985.

Dark's a pretty, pleasant presence, as much a poet and sociologist as a performer. She doesn't pretend to be an actress, nor try to impersonate or even conjure her characters vocally. She often reads her stories from journals, as if her show were, in fact, a reading. On Sunday, she brought the rare pleasure of listening to a warm, lilting, unamplified human voice. Dark dubs her format "stand-up storytelling."

Her material varies from autobiographical vignettes to reports of "field work" to the kind of loosely structured verse featured at poetry slams. Her big themes are gender roles ("mostly socially constructed," she keeps reminding us) and how these relate to low-wage workers such as strippers and waitresses and to everyone's need for love without oppression.

For anyone who has read or seen the stage show adapted from Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," most of Dark's insights about the perilous lives of the working poor will be familiar.

Running through the evening, too, is Dark's attempt to overturn what she considers new stereotypes about the "freedom" exercised by such sex workers. She pulls out a couple of pairs of those 8-inch platform heels worn by strippers and drag-queens to make her show-and-tell points about the hobbling of female sexuality and what that says about the voyeurs watching them. And she does so humorously by inviting men in the audience onstage to try clomping around in that impossibly awkward footgear.

Dark's love poems are candid and pretty conventional. She closed her show with a valentine to San Diego, "I Could Drink a Case of You," that helped earn her an enthusiastic standing ovation from an audience of several hundred.

If Dark's one-night show was a disappointment, this second look at the newly restored North Park Theatre was not. The scale and interior design of the audience chamber conjures an elegant room in a European house. The acoustics are excellent, and with the large orchestra pit covered, the stage thrusts forward, allowing a soloist such as Dark to stand close to the audience - good omens for the many local groups that will be performing at this new home of the Lyric Opera San Diego.

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