There’s that “Oh, no. What have I done?” moment.

For the heroine in Akuyoe Graham’s story, everything was going great – until she sabotaged herself.

The woman, you see, gets into a prestigious acting workshop. Then she goes and has an affair, a romance that distracts her. Next thing she knows, she’s too embarrassed to go to class.

So begins “Spirit Awakening,” the one-woman show Graham presents at Key City Public Theatre this weekend and next.

On the snug stage, she portrays no fewer than 12 characters, all of whom gather on the protagonist’s path of figuring out who she is and what she’s doing here.

“It starts out on a mountaintop, which symbolizes that she’s lost; she’s nowhere,” the Ghanaian-born Graham said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles.

Away we go on her travels back and forth in time.

“Spirit” is in part a memory play, said Graham, in the style of Tennessee Williams. It also walks a path similar to Graham’s. The show follows a girl from Ghana as she moves to Europe, where she grows up, and then to the United States, where she pursues an acting career.

This character, as she navigates her life, may not always be the most sensible woman you’ll meet.

“I really put her out there,” Graham said. “I would love the audience to ask themselves: ‘Is she crazy?’”

We first encounter our heroine when she’s in her 30s, just as Graham was when she moved to the United States. She was a performer on tour in “A Raisin in the Sun,” when she seized the opportunity to fly off to the Caribbean island of Bequia. There, she joined an acting workshop with renowned teacher Sanford Meisner.

Today, Graham, 59, is an actor in movies and stage productions; she debuted her one-woman show in 1992.

It was well received and led to a new path for Graham: the Spirit Awakening Foundation.

She started the Los Angeles County nonprofit organization (spiritawakening.org) in 1995 and continues, with her crew, to teach art, writing and mindfulness practices to teenagers in high schools and at juvenile detention centers.

When she wrote this one-woman play, “It felt very edgy and provocative,” Graham recalled.

It still does.

Sexual power dynamics, race relations, life as an immigrant – aspects of the play align with modern struggles, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter included.

“Oh, my God. It’s so timely, it’s kind of scary,” Graham said.

LOCAL TOUCH

The performer has traveled to the Olympic Peninsula a number of times, including this past September for the Port Townsend Film Festival, during which she interviewed special guest Morgan Neville in a program that took place at Port Townsend High School.

She’s also talked with Key City Public Theatre artistic director Denise Winter on several occasions about bringing “Spirit” to town.

“When we find these folks from outside our community who have an interesting story to tell, it creates a dialogue [in Port Townsend and environs] that is just different,” Winter said.

Winter also is looking for ways to get the performer involved in future activities; with Graham, she envisions a writing workshop with local women.

For this show, Winter found a local artist to give “Spirit” a special touch. Sculptor Margie McDonald is meeting with Graham to design a banyan tree, made of rope, to stand on the Key City stage.

Yet another local woman who helped make “Spirit” happen here is Cindy Daccurso. Graham’s agent and friend for more than a decade, Daccurso left North Hollywood for the Pacific Northwest earlier this decade.

She has lived in Port Hadlock full-time for about two years, and continues to work as a talent agent – “everything’s internet now” – while flying to California every other month.

Daccurso heard about Key City Public Theatre, but was skeptical at first about its quality.

“Here’s this little theater. I wonder what it’s like,” she recalls saying.

“I was blown away,” she said.

Daccurso has since become a season subscriber. She and her spouse, Joseph Daccurso, are producing Graham’s six Key City performances, just prior to the beginning of the theater’s 60th season.

“I’ve produced ‘Spirit Awakening’ a couple of times in LA, and watched it at many different venues,” she said.

Graham has a magnetism that pulls the viewer into her orbit. “When you meet her, you’ll say, ‘Yeah, I get it,’” said Daccurso.

The performer herself added that there’s one more special effect in the “Spirit” experience: live drumming from Zambian native Masauso Chiumya.

He happens to be her husband as well as the designer of the “Spirit Awakening” poster in which she wears these resplendent monarch butterfly wings around her shoulders.

Can we get some of those wings?

“Absolutely,” she said.

There comes a point in your life, Graham said, when you emerge from your cocoon, wide awake.

“You find your path, you find your voice; you grow your wings so you can fly.”