ALLEN DYNAMIC AS `HARRIET' IN RETURN TO THEATER.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

The show is called ``Harriet's Return,'' but the real comeback story in Westwood this month will be Debbie Allen.

Has it really been 12 years since Allen's fiery presence last illuminated an American theater? Not that Allen has been exactly AWOL from the entertainment world.

A choreographer, director and producer, as well as a highly accomplished dancer/actress, Allen has spent the intervening years winning Emmy awards, making documentaries, helping Gil Cates stage the Oscars show, raising children, and, against long odds, mothering Steven Spielberg's Middle Passage epic, ``Amistad,'' on its 10-year voyage to the big screen.

Allen's tenacity, to say nothing of her formidable talent, serves her beautifully in the title role of Karen Jones Meadows' fluid, visually poetic fable about Harriet Tubman. Like the legendary abolitionist and tireless Underground Railroad conductor, Allen comes across as a natural leader who inspires others by the sheer heat of her burning humanity.

Developed and first produced at New Jersey's Crossroads Theatre Company, ``Harriet's Return'' scrupulously avoids the tedious fact-dropping and shameless hero-worship that engulfs so many well-meaning historical dramas. Jones Meadow's Tubman isn't some folksy cardboard saint meant to reassure an audience of its liberal good intentions.

Rather, as portrayed by Allen, she's an earthy, lusty, wryly funny warrior-poet, whose faith in her own fierce instincts compensates for her bouts of self-doubt and spiritual confusion. She wouldn't hesitate to kill, if need be, or leap on a sexual rival and claw her eyes out. Tubman's greatness isn't simply assumed here, but is shown to result from wrenching moral and personal choices she made at every step of her long, remarkable life.

Drawing on the rich folkloric traditions of African-American storytelling, the playwright and director Kent Gash have translated this vision of Tubman's life and times into a mystical, lyrical piece that flows to an indomitable rhythm. Like a timeless, well-told children's tale, it exerts a primal hold on the imagination.

Though Allen speaks virtually every line, she's greatly assisted by a Greco-African chorus of four who perform all the other roles. These actors - Seraiah Carol, Thomas Corey Robinson, Stephen Smith and Kyme (no surname) - use mime, dance, elegant kabukilike choreography and the expressive masks designed by costumer Paul Tazewell to distill character into simple, naturalistic gestures.

Never standing still, they conjure up the eccentric personalities and elaborate hierarchies, the melancholy resignation and defiant humor, of plantation life. Sometimes they turn comic, as in their Act 2 portrayal of a group of bourgeois Philadelphia blacks, disdainful of Dixie-bred bumpkins like Tubman. Bunched together, they mince across the stage, pigeon-toed, arms flapping, eyes rolling in mute outrage.

Kevin Ricard's percussion arrangements have much to do with the show's hypnotic pulse. William H. Grant III's lighting design creates marvelous illusions of space and time, plunging us into the heart of a forest or the middle of frenetic, 19th-century Philadelphia. It was in Philadelphia that Tubman first discovered freedom didn't necessarily mean equality.

``Workin' is just like slavery, 'ceptin' you get paid,'' she observes.

Throughout it all, Allen performs as if possessed by the spirits of ancestors - a complete immersion in character. She even pulls off the play's somewhat mawkish coda, in which Tubman addresses her audience, saying, ``All y'all together can make your own future. You're my special passengers.''

``Harriet's Return'' is likely to be as deeply felt and vitally acted a piece of theater as you'll experience this year.

THE FACTS

What: ``Harriet's Return.''

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; through March 1.

Tickets: [phone].

Our rating: Three and One Half Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Debbie Allen plays abolitionist Harriet Tubman with force and humanity.

David Sprague/Daily News