A bare stage is challenging proposition. No scenery, no furniture – nowhere to hide if a line is flubbed or the performance misfires. But in How Not to Make it in America, actor James Smith walks onto a featureless stage wearing angel wings and carrying a duffel bag – and brings New York City along with him.

Written by award-winning Adelaide-based playwright Emily Steel and directed by Corey McMahon, this one-man show – back onstage after an initial 2021 run – takes the audience back to 2001. Matt, a hopeful young Australian actor, has accompanied his girlfriend to New York. While she’s completing an intership, he’s attempting to launch his career on the stage.

Within minutes the tone is set by an exquisitely awkward audition. Under the impression that a production of Romeo and Juliet is experimenting with gender-swapped casting, Matt delivers Juliet’s balcony monologue to the bafflement of an unseen director.

From there the play unfolds in swift, fragmentary scenes as Matt scapes together a precarious life in the big city. Eating buttered bagels and paying rent for a couch, he’s surviving week to week on cash in hand work at a DVD store (which he reframes as “acting research”) while spending his spare hours combing Backstage magazine for off-off-Broadway auditions that might overlook such pesky details as his lack of a visa or Actor’s Equity card.

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Smith’s phenomenal performance is the engine of the show. Over the course of the hour, he plays Matt and another 27 characters who orbit him: bagel vendors, immigration lawyers, his hard-partying roommates Tom and Brian, the relatives he calls in Australia and Matt’s girlfriend Michelle, whose patience begins to fray under the weight of Matt’s obliviousness and naïve ambitions.

The transitions between scenes and characters are signalled through subtle shifts in lighting (cunningly designed by Chris Petridis), but mostly through Smith’s physical precision – a shift in posture, a change of tone or accent – it’s a masterful piece of stagecraft.

Steel’s writing is clever, particularly in her development of character and narrative structure. Scenes arrive non-chronologically, yet they build on each other to gradually fill in the emotional map of Matt’s experience in New York. The fragments keep circling back to the attack on the Twin Towers, the shock of September 11 looming in the background and slowly increasing the gravity of Matt’s story. At first the horror sits at the edges – Matt and Michelle don’t own a television – but the emotional weight of the catastrophe seeps steadily into the narrative.

Michelle struggles with the aftermath, her depression growing as the scale of the tragedy becomes clear. Matt, on the other hand, clings to his auditions and ambitions, oblivious to the emotional distance growing between them. She wants him to return to Australia once his visa expires. He wants to stay and keep trying for his big break.

Steel’s script is a sharp character study – the talented small-town performer who arrives in New York convinced that all it takes is persistence and the ability keep hope alive despite all signs and omens to the contrary. Her writing recognises the comedy in that unflagging optimism, yet never denigrates it.

Smith carries the show with warmth and skill, sustaining the humour even while the undercurrent of desperation gathers strength. The hour flies by, propelled by our total engagement with the path of Matt’s ambitions and the speed bumps he encounters.

Smartly written and beautifully performed, How Not to Make it in America turns one actor, a rack of lights and a black stage into a big city adventure in pursuit of a dream.

How Not to Make it in America is playing at The Studio at Holden Street Theatre until March 22