STAGE REVIEW : Some Old Stories Worth Hearing : The Bowery in San Diego is staging a poignant, funny and powerful two-person drama from a black perspective.

San Diego’s smallest professional theater, the Bowery, has another gem on its hands with Bill Harris’ “Stories About the Old Days.”

The West Coast professional premiere of this show about an elderly black couple who meet, spar and ultimately learn to care about each other, runs through June 30 at the company’s Kingston Playhouse.

Not only should this poignant, funny and powerfully produced two-person play prove a winner for the Bowery, which has been battling a deficit that delayed the show for months, but the subject matter--in which each character wrestles with a long, painful past, a tentative present and uncertain future from a uniquely black perspective--provides an elegant multicultural balance with other shows in town at the moment.

In “Stories About the Old Days,” Ivy, an upstanding sister of the church, immediately takes issue with the new church custodian, Clayborn, whom she catches singing the blues while he works.

The blues come from the devil, she tells him sharply. Nevertheless, they get to know each other, through a series of vignettes in which he tells her about his life as a one-time blues musician now down on his luck and waiting to die, and she reveals some of her own secrets.

Slowly, they discover that underneath their seemingly opposite approaches to life’s trials and tribulations, they are remarkably similar and can understand and help each other as nobody else can.

Harris deftly mixes humor with anger directed both at the white world that used these two and the black world that abandoned them at crucial times, and his writing is empowered by the stirring performances of Antonio T. J. Johnson as Clayborn and Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson as Ivy. The casting of Johnson--a towering man with a voice that can move in a flash from mellowness to thunder--is perfect. To see such an imposing physical presence with a trembling fear of venturing outside makes it clear that this is a man who is weak and afraid not because he was weak to begin with, but because the world has made him so.

He describes the pain of having black audiences desert him as they became too upscale to acknowledge their roots; he was left with only the white boys listening and copying his style--”Xeroxing me and bleaching my blues”--as they found the fame, fortune and acceptance that would always elude him. His tale of a wealthy white woman taking him in and then demoralizing him becomes a symbol not only of a man picking the wrong woman, but also of his loss of faith in his place with his own people.

At the same time, Thompson provides an intensity that seems to come out of years of repression suffered by characters such as Ivy. Her sharp asides cut like a knife through any attempt Clayborn makes to embellish or sweeten his stories.

“Most roosters think it’s their crowing that makes the sun come up,” she observes as he brags about his former prowess with women.

Making clear she is not to be messed with by anybody, she tells him, “Next time you call me a liar, you better call you an ambulance.”

The direction by Ralph Elias, artistic director of the Bowery, keeps the two characters tautly watching the other’s every move, almost as if they are playing a mental version of the checkers they sit down at in the second act.

The tenseness of their interaction is subtly offset by the soothing set by John Blunt, nicely lit by David L. Freeman: a deserted, maroon-draped church where Clayborn cleans and Ivy comes to seek peace. Both are dressed just right by Mirian Laubert: Clayborn in faded jeans, work shoes and an old blue sweater, all of which show the mark of many years of labor, Ivy in stiff, formal church clothes, blacks and whites and grays, that seem to reflect the suffocating extremities of the life she has chosen for herself.

Adding to the eloquence of the show is the intimacy of the Bowery’s small house, which fits the play like a glove. Even the theater’s downtown situation blends in well with the story’s locale: a Detroit ghetto, where the much-vandalized church in which these two meet will soon be closed. The occasional beeps and bleeps of the cars and sirens outside blend in beautifully, almost as if they were part of Lawrence Czoka’s sound design, a rich sampling of the best of the blues.

Although the play is set in 1974, it could easily take place in the present. Clayborn and Ivy may be telling stories about the old days, but the story they are living is a story of now. And now is the time to catch this show, which is a winner in every sense of the word.

“STORIES ABOUT THE OLD DAYS”

By Bill Harris. Director is Ralph Elias. Set by John Blunt. Sound by Lawrence Czoka. Lighting by David L. Freeman. Costumes by Mirian Laubert. Stage manager is Deborah E. Vandergrift. With Antonio T. J. Johnson and Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson. At 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays, through June 30. Tickets are $14-16. Kingston Playhouse, 1057 1st Ave., San Diego, 232-4088.