The art of the monologist is a daring one-just the storyteller and the audience and between them, the language of captured experience. For James Stowell, the monologist of Traveling Light, the daring takes on new proportions, for he draws not on a library of traditional tales, but on the stuff of his own life. Like his contemporaries Spaulding Grey, Bill Talen and others, Stowell intensifies commonplace experience to a level of truth-bearing exultation. In his best stories, there is an uncanny resonance of feeling that drifts upon the cadence and textures of oral poetry. Hailing from a small-town in southern Texas, Stowell explores the powerful ties of family in an insular community and the equally powerful desire to look beyond the immediate hearth. Thus, Stowell's boyhood memories are always tempered by his later years adrift on the two-lane blacktop of America. Stowell's monologues keenly reflect the interdependence of past and present. Stories submerge only to cleverly resurface, digressions plumb unexpected surprises, images and objects become motifs tugging along potent memories: his father's funeral on the Florida coastline, the exhilaration of a first bicycle, a terrifying evening in solitary confinement, a gift of cowboy boots from his grandfather. To preserve the immediacy, director Hanson captured James Stowell's monologue in a single take, employing the medium's framing to accent, not illustrate. As a result, Traveling Light is heavy with heart and soul. Steve Seid