Early on in her latest solo show, “Spanish Stew,” the inimitable comic actor/monologist Marga Gomez whisks us back to San Francisco 1976.  That’s the year she arrived here, from New York, age 20, with Nancy, her college “roommate”—aka her lover—and stayed.

This latest world premiere (she’s created 15 solo shows) focuses on that year, in which she lived in a tiny room without kitchen privileges in the Duboce Triangle, worked as a cook at the Acme Café and looked for love and/or sex in the clubs of the city. She considered herself “on the lam” in the anything-goes punk era.

The tiny stage of the New Conservatory Theatre Center is the perfect venue for Gomez, who connects with her audiences in the warmest ways imaginable. She can induce an entire crowd—or one or two chosen audience members–to talk back, laugh, applaud, on cue. Her goofy, self-effacing stage persona—in this show, she’s super-casual in jeans–is irresistible.

In “Spanish Stew”—the name she gives her signature soup of the day at the café because caldo gallego, a Cuban dish, is too long and difficult for the very sexy waitress to pronounce—she plays a few characters, among them that sexy waitress, an overly chatty landlady, her father and most notably the flamboyant mother with whom she has a fraught relationship.

Under Richard A. Mosqueda’s direction, each character is finely drawn, quirky and hilarious.

It’s a delight to see San Francisco through the eyes of this insecure, eager 20-year-old. In one particularly funny scene, she and Nancy are crashing in a “Rolfing commune” in the Haight, run by a man named, ahem, Wisdom, and eating proscribed “soy products” at the communal dinner. For many in the audience, that’s all they need to know to start laughing.

Gomez, stoned, savoring an illicit burrito—the commune is very strict about diet—is another must-guffaw moment.

And yet another scene morphs into a hallucinogenic dream sequence, the result of some potent Maui Wowie, in which Gomez becomes her own Dad, performing in his signature style.

Throughout, as scenes change—and the occasional costume as well–simple but striking illustrations are projected on the back wall. (Ashley Méndez is set designer; Lana Palmer is sound and projection designer.)

Audiences laughing throughout a two-act comic monologue might not expect a tender, meaningful moment toward the end, but Gomez’s “what happened on Valencia Street” scene feels like the perfect ending to the one-person, multi-character play about a memorably life-changing year in an interesting person’s life. More of that, please.

“Spanish Stew” continues through Nov. 23 at New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets are $43 to $65 at nctcsf.org. 

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