`NEAT' RISES UP ON POWER OF ONE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

The last time Charlayne Woodard brought her unique talents to a Los Angeles stage, the city was still smoldering psychologically and politically from the worst urban unrest in U.S. history.

Woodard's one-woman memory play, ``Pretty Fire,'' sparked an emotional response from audiences and critics alike with its searing, central metaphor of racial intolerance delicately woven into Woodard's poignant and funny memories of her childhood.

Now the writer-actress is back at the Mark Taper Forum with a solo autobiographical sequel, ``Neat.'' Once again, Woodard brings her remarkable family before us in a sequence of sketches that occasionally possess the dramatic heft of short stories.

And although her show's quieter second act doesn't fulfill the thematic promise of its first, Woodard's warmth, skill and unflagging conviction make her recollections tremendously affecting.

The show's title has more than one meaning, but most directly it refers to Woodard's beloved Aunt Beneatha, known as Neat. Brain-damaged since infancy - in an episode that encapsulates the racial legacy of the pre-civil rights South - Neat was a gentle, childlike being trapped in a woman's body, with a drawling voice and and a gift for posing perceptive questions.

As a smart, assimilated African-American girl growing up in Albany, N.Y., Woodard delighted in her gawky, fearless Southern relative - until the year when Neat and her mother (Woodard's grandma) moved up North to stay with Woodard's family. To Woodard's newly adolescent eyes, Neat suddenly looked too, well, country. What would Woodard's Jewish girlfriends think of this strange creature from the Georgia backwoods?

In gradually coming to a deeper, grown-up appreciation of her aunt, Woodard begins to confront her own cultural identity, filtered through the prism of the Black Pride movement of the 1960s and '70s. The play's first act ends stirringly as Woodard re-enacts a brutal episode in which her fellow African-American high school students' peaceful demonstration ends in what appears to be a police riot.

Switching characters faster than an electric typewriter, Woodard demonstrates how a good actor doesn't require props or costume changes to crate an entire world on stage. By adopting a slouch or quickening her cadence, she successively transforms herself into a high school teacher, a Black Panther, a rafters-ringing preacher and her first beau, a young man of such towering sexual self-confidence that Woodard (playing herself) can only respond meekly, ``Yes, Charles.''

The second act largely abandons politics to concentrate on family matters, and although Woodard's scope becomes narrower, her aim is intimate and true. Unobtrusively directed by Daniel Sullivan and wittily accented by Harold Wheeler's ambient music, Woodard enacts these tales as if they were stitched into her soul. In doing so, she stitches them into ours as well.

THE FACTS

What: ``Neat.''

Starring: Charlayne Woodard.

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays; through Feb. 1.

Tickets: $29 to $37. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Playwright-actress Charlayne Woodard draws on experience in ``Neat,'' at the Mark Taper Forum.