By Tawiah M’carthy. Directed by Evalyn Parry. A Buddies in Bad Times Theatre production, presented by the Cultch. At the Cultch’s Historic Theatre on Tuesday, March 24. Continues until April 4

I was worried about this show at first, but then it moved me.

In Obaaberima, Toronto artist Tawiah M’carthy tells the story of Agyeman, who grows up as a queer boy in Ghana and moves to Canada as a young adult. Throughout, Agyeman struggles to reconcile what he regards as the female and male aspects of his identity. As a child, he dresses in his mom’s clothes. As an adult, he narrates his story in his female persona, Sibongile. Sibongile wears orange prison overalls, adapted to look glamorous.

For a long time, Agyeman is lost. When he’s 13, he starts having sex with Opayin, an adult who runs a dressmaking shop. Opayin insists that Agyeman clothe himself for the role: “You can only touch me like this as a woman.” Later, Agyeman falls for Nana Osei, a boy his own age, but Nana Osei wants no part of Agyeman’s female aspect. When both Opayin and Nana Osei disappear from Agyeman’s life in a traumatic series of events, Agyeman moves to Canada, determined to become a good, Christian, heterosexual adult. He courts Philipa, a devout Ghanaian immigrant, but has sex with Elijah, his live-in boyfriend—while lying to both.

As a gay man, I’m hugely sympathetic to this story, but, at first, I found it hard to get into the show. M’carthy is the sole actor, and, off the top, I found his embodiment of the characters—especially the kids—alienatingly broad. Many of the figures are little more than an emblematic gesture and an exaggerated voice. And they don’t have a lot of text or sustained emotional content to fill them out.

But when Agyeman finds Nana Osei, Obaaberima finds its honest, urgent core. In the scene in which these two first make love, they chase one another around the room, and in M’carthy’s movement, that giddy running turns into the flight of a bird. Sibongile says, “The two boys have found each other”. The moment is very still and very moving.

Under Evalyn Parry’s direction, this production from Buddies in Bad Times Theatre continues to feature an odd combination of naturalistic characters, including Philipa and the adult Agyeman, and more cartoonlike figures, such as Elijah. But the stylistic mix doesn’t matter a bit, because the story has found its heart. On opening night, as Sibongile gasped for freedom, both from prison and from repression, M’carthy played the audience like a musical instrument: he would hit an emotional chord and we would moan or laugh or cry in response.

The guy’s movement is phenomenal: he can turn his upper body into liquid, and I particularly relished a little dance that Philipa does in her kitchen. Obaaberima’s other performer, composer and musician Kobèna Aquaa-Harrison, contributes a complex score that also manages to be as organic as wind. And lighting artist Michelle Ramsay’s dynamic, impressively integrated design shows how it’s done.

I feared Obaaberima was going to leave me behind. But when got me, it held me.