The radio star Bill Hawkins (center) with the Dominos in the early '50s.

Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins is Dobama's third consecutive one-person production, and, like the first two, is notable for the exceptional quality of its solo performance.

In the previous Thom Pain and Shorn, Cleveland favorites Scott Plate and Juliette Regnier displayed their commanding, well-established skills in subtly differing ways - he with a considered intellectual approach that contradictorily constructed from an incohesive text a cohesively disintegrated personality; and she, from her own, more conventional script, several disparate, fully rounded characters to illuminate her subject.

W. Allen Taylor, Hawkins' creator and soloist, excels in another manner. He creates a breathtaking kaleidoscopic gallery of effortlessly drawn, economically minimal, but surgically accurate thumbnail sketches of the broad range of folks his autobiographical chronicle unearths in his search for the truth about his dead, never-known father. The evening follows Taylor's late discovery that the man who abandoned him was once something of a celebrity, Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins, Cleveland's first black radio DJ in the late '40s.

This sets the son off on an obsessive search for those still around who had lived, loved, worked and partied with his father. Though the piece has many prideful local associations involving the jive-talking Hawkins' pioneering musical influence and broadcasting popularity, where it lives and glows is in Taylor's embodiment of a parade of vignette portrayals from his childhood, maturation, and adult detective investigation. These are consistently astounding in their sparely achieved veracity and variousness. Uncles, mother, grandfather, stepfather, minister, music teacher, work and play cronies, devoted fan, jazz-club impresario, pool-hall bum - all are distinctly brought to life with the most human credibility. Particularly remarkable are Taylor's females, who owe nothing to camp or draggery, but emerge as total, essential women.

Beyond its welcome fleshing out of some important Cleveland history, Hawkins is a rare opportunity to experience a fresh-to-us, uniquely gifted artist, who brings an enriching brand of imagination to the enormously difficult task of bearing an entire evening all by your lonesome.

Serendipitously, our editor received a letter this week from a disgruntled actor, who accuses me of trashing and utterly dismissing in a May 30 article, not merely his recent near-solo performance but the entire genre of one-person presentations as cheap attempts to make a quick buck.

In his frustration, however, the fellow willfully misread the piece, which made no such generalization. As this and previous columns gleefully demonstrate, I've been fortunate enough to enjoy and laud unaccompanied artists for something like a half-century, reaching back to solo legends like Cornelia Otis Skinner in Paris '90, Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight, Alec McCowan's The Gospel According to Mark, and, perhaps most brilliant but now forgotten, Roy Doltrice's magical evocation of Renaissance memoirist John Aubrey's Brief Lives.

I will, though, confess to disfavoring certain solo shows: the ones where the single performers ain't that noticeably singular.