One Young Life and Several Traumas, With Songs Added Press material for "Shida," an earnest one-woman musical written and performed by Jeannette Bayardelle, says that it is based on a true story. But the piece, in which Ms. Bayardelle enacts one young woman's difficult journey to the brink of adulthood, is more determined to showcase Ms. Bayardelle's vocal and acting talents than to give us a real sense of the title character. That gives the tale a generic feel, because while Shida's tribulations - sexual abuse as a child, pregnancy, drug addiction - are traumatic, they have also been depicted repeatedly on the stage and the screen and the page. Ms. Bayardelle, whose credits include the Broadway productions of "Hair" and "The Color Purple," shows off an impressive voice and an ability to play multiple characters (and to play Shida at various ages). But her script doesn't linger long enough in any one place to let us identify with Shida or know much about her hopes and dreams. She wants to be a writer, we're told, but a writer of what? Poetry? Novels? Screenplays? No time to make that clear; got to move along to the next scene. Ms. Bayardelle's songs, too, often tease rather than fulfill. Though there is a lot of music in this show, and Ms. Bayardelle's voice more than fills the small Ars Nova theater, many of the songs are, like the character portrayals, fragments. They sound great, and you wish they'd last a little longer but, again, no time for that. The show, at 70 minutes, is about the length it should be, but the "how much can I stuff in here?" approach works against it. So "Shida," directed by Andy Sandberg, ends up as an impressive performance that doesn't really linger in the mind. Fewer characters and actor pyrotechnics, more development of the main character might be in order if Ms. Bayardelle wants Shida's story to mean as much to us as it obviously does to her.