STAR OF `NEAT' EXPLORING SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Get ready. Charlayne Woodard is going to laugh.

You can tell, because the actress has just made a reference to the racial climate of the Deep South, circa 1960 - ``what I call apartheid,'' she says.

It's a loaded subject for Woodard, who grew up in Albany, N.Y., but spent many summers with her family visiting relatives in Savannah, Ga. So loaded, in fact, that for a second Woodard falls silent.

But only for a second. Then she lifts her eyebrows and laughs - a knowing, explosive guffaw that both reassures and cautions her listeners. ``Don't worry,'' the laugh seems to say, ``we're on dangerous ground here, but we're going to get through this together.''

Woodard uses laughter the way a munitions expert might use a pair of wire-cutters. In her skilled hands, it becomes an instrument for disarming incendiary topics.

Five years ago, in her searing one-woman memory play ``Pretty Fire,'' Woodard invoked sly humor to animate several key episodes from her childhood, including a revelatory first encounter with racism. ``Pretty Fire'' enjoyed an acclaimed run at the Fountainhead Theatre in Hollywood before moving on to the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles.

Now Woodard is taking her story several steps further with a sequel, ``Neat.'' Opening Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, ``Neat'' traces Woodard's coming of age in an urban African-American family during the social uproar of the '60s and the emerging black pride movement.

Relatively speaking

Of the dozen characters Woodard portrays, none is more central to her narrative than Aunt Benetha, known as Neat. Though brain-damaged since birth, Neat became a spiritual pillar of Woodard's adolescence, an island of calm and clarity amid the turmoil of the times.

``She was brave, to us little kids,'' Woodard says of her aunt. ``She wasn't afraid to go to the outhouse without a flashlight! That was the one terrible thing for city girls - the outhouse! She wasn't afraid of the outhouse. She wasn't afraid of the chickens.''

Best known for her acting accomplishments, Woodard (no relation to actress Alfre Woodard) trained at Chicago's Goodman Theatre school. She received a Tony Award nomination for her performance in the original Broadway cast of ``Ain't Misbehavin' '' and has had recurring roles on television's ``Days of Our Lives,'' ``Fresh Prince of Bel Air'' and ``Roseanne.''

Since moving to Los Angeles in 1989, she has continued to act on stage at the La Jolla Playhouse and elsewhere while also writing plays. When ``Neat'' was first produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City, a reviewer for The New York Times praised it as ``a powerful, heartbreaking and beautiful tale.''

With ``Neat,'' Woodard continues the process she began in ``Pretty Fire'' of untangling her African-American heritage. As with most African-Americans, that heritage is deeply rooted in the South.

To Woodard's young eyes, the South was an exotic place where the food was rich, the air was heavy with floral perfume, and the natives' drawling accents sounded like singing.

``I had these very eccentric relatives like Cousin Becka,'' Woodard says, ``and she would chew tobacco and spit in a can. Ping!''

Southern exposure

Woodard's mother, however, had a decidedly less romanticized view of the South, which she impressed upon her two daughters.

``All the way down it was really great fun until we passed the Mason-Dixon line, and that's where my mom would get testy,'' Woodard recalls. ``When we saw the lace trees, as my sister and I called them, that's how we knew were in the South.

``We would see what we considered beautiful people walking barefoot and out in the fields. My mother would hate that stuff. My mother would say, `I'm just sick and tired of Jim Crow.' We didn't know who he was. We'd go around saying, `Jim Crow, you'd better get out of here!' We thought he was an old man.''

From Woodard's youthful perspective, Aunt Neat embodied the South in all its quaint, unhurried charm.

But when Neat later moved North to live with Woodard's family, the young girl's perceptions changed. Having arrived at the awkward age of 12, the urbanized Charlayne suddenly saw her aunt as embarrassingly backward and countrified.

From the fourth grade on, Woodard had been fast-tracked into advanced classes at school. Many of her friends were Jewish girls. Consequently, like Aunt Neat, she was something of a stranger in a strange land.

``I lived in many worlds,'' she says. ``I was in the white world, I was in the black world. I was with the cheerleaders, I was in the band, I was in the choir, and then I was with the hippies in the theater department.''

Not so easy

Because it probed sensitive psychological terrain, Woodard says that ``Neat'' was harder to write than ``Pretty Fire.'' When she first began developing the show at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Woodard says she realized that previously ``I'd just been telling the easy stories.''

The play's director, Daniel Sullivan, isn't sure he agrees.

``I think the attempted rape story from `Pretty Fire' is a pretty devastating story,'' says Sullivan, the Seattle Rep's former artistic director.

But he concurs that Woodard's free-flowing laughter helps remove the sting from her painful reflections.

``I think it's a habit, and it's a habit that's put to very good use in the play,'' he says. ``The objectifying quality of humor is always there.''

Though Woodard has spent many hours revisiting the South in her imagination, she ironically hasn't set foot there since childhood. She can't help but look at it as the scene of a crime, and she senses that ``there are ghosts all over the place.''

``I really need to go back down there and spend some time.''

But a moment later, she reverses herself.

``I live in a little world, a smaller world,'' she says of her new Los Angeles roots. ``I have no urge to go cross-country. I am quite frankly afraid of the middle of this country. I'm quite frankly not taking a road trip.''

Once more, Charlayne Woodard laughs her cautious laugh. Then she reconsiders again.

``But you see, you're always afraid of what you don't know,'' she says. ``You want to get to know folk. You want them to get to know you.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Neat.''

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

When: Opens Sunday. Show times are 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].

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Photo

Photo: Charlayne Woodard continues to explore her roots in ``Neat.''

Terri Thuente/Daily News