San Francisco performer Mia Paschal tried to commit suicide seven times. "I was tired of myself," she says in "This Lily Was (Fontana)," her searing and (unsurprisingly) serious solo-performance show.

Paschal is a gifted entertainer, and she commands the stage from the moment she takes it with a non-nonsense vocal strut. Following various threads of her life, including horrific childhood memories of abuse, she fuses philosophical digressions with concrete biographical jolts in a sweeping, ambitious monologue. At heart she tries to answer THE question: Why does a person try to commit suicide?

The answer, she suggests, is simple: to shock, to jar, to shake up a life.

At one point in New York, she says, she took an overdose of Valium. And she remembers the utter and complete feeling of happiness she experienced realizing she had made the right choice. She was so happy, she says, that she called a suicide hotline to tell the workers there the news. Which is what saved her, of course.

It's those kinds of inconsistencies that make suicide so complex, and Paschal's glimpse at the inner workings of a person undergoing such turmoil are raw and real. Using a well-chosen musical score, she replicates the din of an addled mind unsure whether or not to harm one's own body. To make that "noise" go away, she would slice the inside of her arm. Self-mutilation became an intermediate step to suicide: something she could inflict upon herself and still cling to life.

If all this sounds heavy, it is. (There are some comedic elements, but all in all, it's a somber piece.) There are times when "This Lily Was (Fontana)" gets bogged down in its own abstraction. It drifts so far away from the concrete terms of Paschal's life that it risks losing an audience. Savagely deep intellectual concepts might triumph on the printed page, but in a spoken-word performance, sometimes what's needed most is clarity.

Still, the show is strong and moving. Paschal is a tough, triumphant presence. And the best thing is: She's still here.