Leslie Perry dies at 77; professional storyteller valiantly fought ALS

When professional storyteller Leslie Perry was in his prime, his performances were electrifying displays of verbal pyrotechnics, with Perry shouting out passages like a hellfire preacher while sometimes dancing back and forth on the stage, his fists pumping in rhythm with the recitation.

In more recent years, with his body sapped by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Perry sat in a chair while telling his stories. And though his movements had to be far more subtle, the vocal colors he brought to his stories made them no less riveting.

As time went on, his tales became more personal, and the storyteller became the story.

“I have reached a milestone,” he said as he ended a performance at the Coffee Gallery near his home in Altadena approximately two years after his 2009 diagnosis. It had been the maximum time he had once been given to live. “I’m still here,” he told the audience. “I’m still holding on, and hanging in. And I’m still telling stories. And this is one of them.”

Perry, 77, died March 5 at a hospice facility in Altadena, said his brother, Ronald.

His last public appearance was in February 2013 at the San Diego Black Film Festival after a showing of “The Story Man,” a documentary film about Perry. “The audience gave him a standing ovation,” said Erik Hudson, who directed the 2011 film. “They all lined up to meet him, and suddenly he said, ‘I’m going to tell a story.’” He was in a wheelchair and looking frail. But when he began telling one of his favorite stories — “The Prize Mule” about a mule who rises up to defy his devious owner after being given up for dead — his voice grew stronger.

“His energy was greater than the disease in his body,” Hudson said. “People were laughing and crying.”

Perry, who came out of the radical theater movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, mostly performed at small venues including community centers, museums and schools. Sometimes he would create his own opportunities to perform, as he did by cofounding the annual L.A. Storytelling Festival.

“Storytelling is more than just folk tales and rhymes; it provides a connection with our past,” he said in a 1994 Los Angeles Times interview. “Storytelling captures and saves moments of our culture, and in the process it provides a history of all people.”

Perry was born May 28, 1936, in Saginaw, Mich. As a teenager he would perform for his family. “We had a stairway in the house,” said his brother, Ronald. “He would start at the top and come down, imitating the singer doing ‘Stairway to Paradise’ from the film ‘An American in Paris.’ We all thought it was amusing, but he was determined to be a performer.”

In 1956 the family moved to Southern California, where Perry took classes at Pasadena City College. Moving north, he got a bachelor’s in theater at San Jose State University and performed several roles in productions staged by Aldridge Players West, a black theater troupe based in Berkeley. Perry taught classes at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and played a key role in the satirical play “The Mock Trial of Huey Newton” based on the trial of the cofounder of the Black Panther Party.

Although the play was seen as sympathetic to Newton, the other cofounder of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, burst into the theater in the middle of a performance to loudly object to it. According to actor Ted Lange, who was in the production and later played the bartender Isaac Washington in “The Love Boat” TV series, Perry stood up to him. “The guy was a firebrand back in the ‘60s,” Lange said in the documentary. “He didn’t take crap from nobody, Bobby Seale included.”

Perry developed and toured in a solo show in which he played the part of 19th century writer and activist Frederick Douglass. Settling back in Southern California, where he got his master’s degree in theater at Cal State L.A., he devoted himself to storytelling for children and adult audiences.

“Our success, you need to look at in a different way,” he said in the film. “Everything is not measured by how much money you make and how famous you are. But have you been creating work, and doing things that touch some folks?”

In addition to his brother, who lives in Altadena, Perry is survived by sisters Willa Mae Williams of Live Oak, Texas, and Hazel Burden of Saginaw. He also has a daughter, Aydia, but they had not been in touch for many years, Ronald Perry said.

david.colker@latimes.com