Larry Riley--Well-Seasoned Performer for All Media

“Ask me a question, and I’ve got a story for you.”

From Larry Riley, that’s an offer he can back up. He has built up a few trunkloads of tales from his years crossing back and forth between theater and film and television, even though he is only 37. Riley is definitive proof that only a few years as an actor, traversing the media like a soldier-for-hire working for numerous clients, can season you quickly.

Ask Riley if it’s a matter of good timing that the same night he’s opening as performer and producer in Martin Jones’ play “West Memphis Mojo” at the Ensemble Studio Theatre Sunday--Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth date--he’s also playing King in the CBS-TV movie, “Unconquered” (9 p.m.).

“We planned (the play) for Martin’s birth,” he replied. “And I know that the producers wanted ‘Unconquered’ to air at that time.” Then, rapid-fire, he added: “Do you want to hear a story?”

Riley was off and running.

“I was there (in Memphis) the day King was shot. And I don’t mean I was in the same town. I mean I was outside the Lorraine Motel, waiting for him when he was shot. I was part of a youth effort (he was 17 at the time) for the sanitation workers’ strike that Martin was there to support.”

Riley had grown up in the Memphis neighborhood known as Orange Mound (for the orange trees growing on the land of a former plantation and the nearby Indian burial mounds). The area in and around Memphis--the city itself, the deeply rural Mississippi borderlands to the south, and the mostly black West Memphis, where Jones’ play is set in 1955--is “like a reduced version of the South.

“Martin didn’t have to come there, and what I remember, even more than the horrible shock of those days, was how I got to know Martin, Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson as human beings quite different from their media images.”

Which was why Riley had passed on previous offers to play King in TV projects (“Producers wanted to sell King as a personality, not his message”). “Unconquered” creator Dick Lowry convinced him otherwise.

Television is being good to Riley right now. He believes his “Knots Landing” role as a middle-class husband transcends black cultural stereotypes. Still, he’s pushing himself back into the theater.

“Theater is what lifted me up,” he smiled, “and let me find out about every facet of my personality. I’ve been singing since I could cry. I acted in college (Memphis State and Washington’s American University). I studied with Memphis’ Ballet South. There were more sides to me than I could express in any one place.”

After a brief stint at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, Riley’s first school of hard knocks was the Windy City’s Free Street Theatre, which toured Midwestern cities and shopping malls, “sometimes 30 cities a month. We traveled in a caravan, set up, did a warm-up show, a puppet show, a dance, comedy, the main show, and a wrap-up show. You became a jack-of-all-trades, and fast.”

The other invaluable benefit of Free Street was working with another legend, dancer Wilbur Bradley, one of Lena Horne’s men in “Stormy Weather,” still active and a Midwest theater legend.

“When Michael Peters (who is directing ‘Mojo’ and who co-choreographed ‘Dreamgirls’ with Michael Bennett) asked me during ‘Dreamgirls’ auditions if I had done any dancing. I said: ‘Wilbur Bradley.’ He answered: ‘That’s all I need to know. Show me your stuff.’ ” Riley did and got the job.

The dual assignment in “West Memphis Mojo” of playing Frank, a hip, world-wise R&B; guitarist (with some on-stage riffing), and the show’s producer is a fulfillment, Riley thinks, of training.

“Hey, I’m one of those people who’s trying to figure out a way to have a phone surgically implanted in my arm,” he said, almost casually adding that rehearsing “Mojo” at night and performing in “Knots Landing” during the day, while preparing a musical version of the life of the R&B; hit maker Louis Jordan (“ not (French performer) Louis Jourdan”) is easy.

If this is easy, what is hard?

“Try early-morning tapings of ‘The Doctors,’ rehearsing Randy Newman’s revue ‘Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong’ in the afternoon, and being in ‘A Soldier’s Play’ at the Negro Ensemble Company at night. That was about five years ago in New York. That’s hard.

“But I love juggling balls. I wouldn’t do it for any play, though,” he said, explaining that since 1984, “Mojo” has been a kind of Holy Grail for him.

“It’s about how black artists got ripped off, and ripped each other off, but at bottom, it’s about male bonding.” Riley was one of the script’s early enthusiasts, “but (TV) jobs just kept coming and coming. As much as I wanted to do the play, I feel now--and it’s not a feeling I like--that I strayed away from the stage.”