A Renovated ‘Cabin’ : Theater: Those who worked to bring the revisionist version of the Harriet Beecher Stowe classic to the stage call the experience exhausting, painful--and worth it.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is making a comeback.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1851 novel about slavery, which is among the most loved and hated books of the past century, is being rediscovered and reinterpreted by contemporary companies--from San Francisco to New York to Seattle.

But it is doubtful that Stowe would recognize her well-meant abolitionist melodrama that inflamed the North and provoked Abraham Lincoln to call her “the little lady who made the big war.”

The latest incarnation is the Tony award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe’s “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ” The touring company kicks off a national trek at the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Lyceum Stage tonight.

African-American playwright Robert Alexander puts Stowe on trial for creating such stereotypes as the saintly, God-fearing Uncle Tom who never talks back to his master; Topsy, the original pickaninny, and all of the slaves who fawn over white Little Miss Eva and her pretty golden curls.

At the same time, Alexander gives Stowe her due, he said in a telephone interview from his San Francisco home.

In his play, the characters accuse Stowe of creating and perpetuating stereotypes.

“Meanwhile, she’s tired of black anger and tired of the noise, she’s tired of being guilty, she’s tired of being the accused, and she’s even started to question affirmative action,” Alexander said. “Then the characters do their version of what really happened, and Tom shows Harriet these things she left out.

“We see Tom actively playing the role of a surrogate father to Topsy, and we retrieve him from Harriet’s version of sainthood and paint him as our own type of saint. Despite a couple of moments of anger, he’s pretty civilized. He puts faith in mankind--you see him actively seeking freedom from his master. She says, ‘Maybe I didn’t get it right.’

“But personally, I respect her. She was a white woman. She visited one or two plantations for a short time, and she could not possibly know the African-American experience at that time. But I thought she did the best she could with her limited knowledge, and that her heart was in the right place,” Alexander said.

Still, it hasn’t been easy to bring this piece to fruition. The playwright first commissioned to write the San Francisco show, Ntozake Shange, dropped out in 1989 over a royalty dispute. Alexander, who had written four other shows for the troupe, was hired, and his first version, called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was co-produced by the troupe and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco last fall.

That first version, like the title, was faithful to the book. The show evolved through a handful of productions in Northern California. Dan Chumley, the director, calls the current production, opening under the new title for the first time, the “real premiere” of this work.

But it took blood on the tracks to get to this point.

“At one point, we were arguing internally so much that we thought maybe there is a curse on it,” Chumley said during a rehearsal break at the San Diego Rep last week.

He blames some of the conflict on himself. He said that, as a white male in a position of authority at the company, he had an unconscious expectation that performers would defer to his judgment. They didn’t.

“It was emotionally exhausting, with constant rehearsals and arguments,” Chumley said. “It was a struggle to keep making it right, a struggle to argue through the problems. There were phone calls at 3:30 in the morning, battles, and you had to constantly say the work is more important than how I feel, the work is more important than anything or anybody.

“People were talking about how hard it is to play this scene, how hard it is to play that scene,” he said. “Topsy has to respond when whistled for. The actress balked at that. I was going to cast Little Eva as Asian. Lonnie (Lonnie Ford, the black actor who plays Tom) felt for the play to work it had to be a little white girl. That was a big struggle.”

Ultimately, Chumley cast Little Eva as white. But that conflict was just one of many. The show “took years off my life,” he said, even though he pronounced himself more proud of the final product than of any other work he has done.

“This one has more of my soul in it; it gives it all back in heart,” Chumley said.

Making it all work involved “learning to listen in a different way, to hear people and to defer even when I didn’t think they were right,” he said. “To do this, I had to say, ‘I trust you.’ It’s part of enfranchisement to let people own the production they’re working in.”

For Alexander, some of the pain in the play welled up from as simple a source as the language itself--which he described as harsh.

“This is the only play I’ve written where I have had white characters referring to blacks as niggers,” he said quietly.

It also made him draw upon memories of childhood expressions that, in the past, he never fully understood.

“I used lines that I heard in my house that were from slave songs or slave expressions,” Alexander said. “Tom says, ‘I work from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night,’ because slaves had no concept of what time was.”

In Seattle, the Alice B. Theatre, in association with the Empty Space Theatre, did its own adaptation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in April.

Susan Finque, an associate artistic director of the Alice B. who directed “Unkle Tomm’s Kabin: A Deconstruction of the Novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe,” said she faced conflicts with her cast very similar to those Chumley described.

As a white director, she said, she was often challenged by members of the cast: “Are you applying white interpretation into that scene, director?” she remembers being asked.

“Rewrites were painful and continued up to opening night,” Finque said. “We had tremendously long nights. We had casting problems. We had a hard time getting people to stay in the cast. Opening night was a miracle. But it was worth it, even though it was a flawed product.”

The show drew small audiences and will likely remain on the shelf indefinitely, Finque said. But she’s glad she did it because “the show changed my life and the lives of people who worked on it.”

“I think about racism in a completely different way now. I think that in my radical, younger days I felt I could change the world. I still do, but I now realize certain impenetrabilities, certain things that we cannot rise above and yet we have to,” Finque said.

New York-based Bill T. Jones’ “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land” with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, used the Uncle Tom story as a leaping-off point to talk about issues that affected him deeply: AIDS (which claimed the life of his longtime partner and lover Arnie Zane), the oppression of females and the oppression of gays.

The show did well at San Diego’s Spreckels Theatre in March, with more than 70% of the house filled each night, but there were walkouts by offended patrons at each performance.

The pain involved in each of these productions seems to beg the question of why anyone should still do “Uncle Tom.” For Chumley, the answer is that slavery is where tensions between American blacks and whites began.

“Race relations have moved backward in the last 10 to 15 years--not forward,” he said. “There are a few black individuals who have made it to powerful positions, but they’re just individuals. We tour a lot, so we see that ghettos are scary. The anger that we feel coming from blacks is very similar to the period in the early ‘60s before the civil rights movement. Something has to change, something new has to happen. I don’t know exactly what the answer is. But we thought by starting where the question initiated--with slavery--we would get somewhere.”

The demand for the show has also encouraged Chumley that he is on the right track. It is booked through 1993 on a tour that will retrace the Freedom Trail, which slaves used to escape from bondage in Florida to freedom in Vermont. With the help of sympathetic abolitionists, slaves traveled through secret chambers under houses and hid under false carriage bottoms.

“I’m very confident of the play,” Chumley said. And since the name was changed, “it’s been twice as easy to book. It does take that ugly sting out of it.”

What’s in a name is truly significant in this case, he said. The change is symbolic of the personality change the company is giving to Stowe’s most famous character.

“We’re trying to redefine who Uncle Tom is,” Chumley said. “Maybe the guy who works for 30 years and puts his kids through school is an Uncle Tom, but that’s not the worst thing. To be able to survive and to hold families together may be the solution to building the base that will change the black world.”

Performances of “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ ” are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday, through Nov 2. At the Lyceum Stage, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego. 235-8025.