SAN DIEGO COUNTY : Performer’s Storytelling Roots Help Her Spin Own Tale of Artistic Success

Actress, writer and performance artist Jo Harvey Allen recalls that when anyone asked what books were in her family home in Lubbock, Texas, the reply was “the Bible, the Girl Scout Handbook and ‘Emily Post’s Etiquette.’ ”

But everyone in the house knew there was one other.

“ ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was hidden in the cedar chest,” Allen said. “And that one got all the action.”

Allen, who is here to perform her one-woman show, “As It Is in Texas,” at 8 p.m. Saturday at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, grew up with a penchant for juicy stories.

“I came from a storytelling family,” she said in a telephone interview last week from her home in Santa Fe, N. M. “My grandfather ran the elevator in the only tall building in Lubbock, and he was a great storyteller.

“Once a year he made this hot chili. He would grind all the peppers and make the chili and invite everybody over who rode the elevator.”

He stayed at home for two days spinning yarns with visitors, Allen said. He sat them down at the kitchen table, gave them a bowl of chili and crackers, and they would tell stories.

“Always at the dinner table, it was who could outdo the other,” Allen said. “All I remember doing was telling all these stories with people. You had to learn to do it. It was the only way to get any attention at all. You had to (upstage) somebody at the dinner table.” Allen learned her storytelling well. She has a stack of rave reviews from the country’s major film and stage critics. She has an international reputation as a performance artist, and is in increasing demand as an actress.

Allen recently completed “The Motorist,” a video by UC San Diego Professor Chip Lord that is about to debut at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Next month, she starts shooting the film “Miss Love,” directed by Joan Tewkesbury, with Faye Dunaway in Georgia. Other projects in the planning stage include a collaborative piece with singer John Duykers (“Nixon in China”), producer Robin Kirk, and musicians Paul Dresher, Terry Allen and Randy Eckert for the next year’s Spoleta Festival that will also tour major cities. She and her musician son Bukka have been asked to do a program on abused children for National Public Radio.

As “the Lying Woman” in the 1986 David Byrne satirical film, “True Stories,” Allen blurted a mesmerizing melange of outrageous whoppers. She is featured in the David Leland movie satire “Checking Out,” opening this month.

In the movie, “I’ve really got the hots for Jeff Daniel, who’s obsessed thinking he is going to die,” Allen said. “I attack him sexually in a bloody car wreck when I find that he’s alive.

“I feel good about the movie,” she chuckled, her voice redolent with the elided textures of her West Texas roots.

Allen came relatively late in life to acting. It wasn’t until 1978, when she was about 35, that she appeared in Houston in a stage play, “The Embrace . . . Advanced to Fury,” which was written by her husband, Terry Allen.

“I played the lead woman role in this story about a man and a woman,” she said. “The alter egos were real wrestlers.”

For the part, Allen wore a mask. Friends failed to recognize her.

“I wouldn’t take the mask off until it had cut into my face and

my lips were bleeding. I enjoyed the feeling of acting like another person. I realized after acting in that play that I had to act.”

She also realized that nobody was going to knock on the door and ask her to act in Fresno, where the Allens and their two sons lived until last December. There, Terry wrote music, plays and made art objects, including three 30-foot-high, lead-covered trees now in UCSD’s Stuart Sculpture Collection. In Fresno, she had functioned chiefly as a wife and mother.

But after 1978, she studied acting and traveled around the country doing poetry readings.

Then she pitched an alternative art gallery in San Francisco called 80 Langdon Street. A year earlier, 80 Langdon had asked Allen to exhibit excerpts from her book of interviews, “The Beautiful Waitress.” But in 12 months, the gallery’s entire board of directors had changed.

“They didn’t know me from Adam,” Allen recalled. She fired off another letter, with this manifesto: “I have scrubbed the bathroom floor a million times, and I am ready to move on.”

The gallery signed her.

Good luck followed, and, besides performing in truck stops and cafes, Allen began to get gigs in upscale museums and art galleries.

“David Byrne saw me performing,” she said. “That led to TV and other film work.” She writes off the success of her new career as a “lucky streak.”

Allen uses extensive interviews to develop her one-woman shows like “As It Is in Texas,” “Hally Lou”--about the fantasies of the wife of a traveling West Texas revivalist--and “Counter Angel”--a portrait of a Lubbock truck stop waitress.

Hally Lou is taken “word-for-word” from a West Texas tent revival that Allen attended. She describes “As It Is in Texas,” as “kind of weird.”

“I read poetry from (my) book ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ ” Allen said. “I tell stories. God, I do the whole bit,” she laughed. “Every once in a while I start singing. That’s when people may want to get under their seats.”

The shift from mother to performing artist has been substantial. But Allen credits her children as a source of creative inspiration. She used to surreptitiously record her sons Bukka and Bale (now college-age) and their cohorts.

“I would take ‘em to a horror movie and have the car all wired when I picked them up. I’d get these great responses to the movies. The kids were always much more of an inspiration all those years. They had such great ideas.”

Now Allen feels “really happy” with the course of her new career.

“I got to be home with my kids and do that whole thing,” she said. “I feel really happy now getting a chance to do other things.”