According to the US Census Bureau, around 24 percent of American children are living in a household with a mother but no father. Where's Papi?, a new solo show by actor and improv performer Miguel Morales, is a simple account, in brief snapshot scenes, of what it was like to grow up in one.

Morales was born in Puerto Rico, but we first meet him as a kid in Chicago, crawling around on his hands and knees, scrutinizing the floor. The family vacuum cleaner is broken, he tells us, and Papi has offered to pay him and his siblings a few cents for each thing they pick out of the carpet. "I got 33 things," he says in an eager little-kid voice, but one of them is pretty big, so he figures he can break it into two things for a few extra pennies. He then plots his trip to the corner store and the candy he's going to buy. The lights go down, the lights come up, and it's later in the day, when he tells us he and his sister fought over some of the candy. Papi got involved—"You never want Papi to get involved," he informs us sagaciously—and gave them each a few bofetadas (smacks). The lights go down again.

Morales continues the tour through his upbringing in this quick-cut style: going to the bar with Papi, playing catch with an older cousin, trying to impress Papi on the pitcher's mound, watching Papi get drunker and more distant from the family, resenting Papi, reconciling with Papi, resenting Papi again, and so on. These are stories we've heard before, but Morales tells them with the urgency and immediacy one feels about one's own childhood, adding a few vivid details about life in his Puerto Rican corner of a big city: the cooking, the disappointment in how Latinos are portrayed on television, the humor. "I know Puerto Rican judo," he tells us in the sly voice of a little kid trying on a slightly grown-up joke. "Ju don' know if I got a knife," he says, laying on the heavier accent of his parents' generation, "ju don' know if I got a gun, ju don' know what I got!" Then he beams at us proudly.

Objectively, Papi doesn't sound like a model father, but Morales's story traces the irrationality and imbalance of familial love, and the peculiar way that some children in single-parent households cling even more fiercely to the parent who's letting them down rather than the parent who's doing the hard work of loving and raising them on a daily basis. After all these years, "Where's Papi?" is a question that, for Morales and millions of others, is still worth asking. recommended