STAGE REVIEW : ‘Uncle’ Ignites Stowe With ‘90s Zing

Abraham Lincoln said that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped create the Civil War.

“I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle,” Robert Alexander’s provocative deconstruction of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, is based on the belief that the war goes on.

No longer a War Between the States, the battles are now being fought over affirmative action, Clarence Thomas, and gangs in the streets. But they’re tied to the same phenomena that Stowe analyzed, and to the same stereotypes that Stowe’s book helped create.

Although an earlier version of Alexander’s “revisionist” look at “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” played in San Francisco, the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s revised “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle” is making its debut at the financially imperiled San Diego Repertory Theatre.

It’s a knockout. Incendiary yet judicious, ominous yet hilarious, “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle” is an example of the Mime Troupe’s brand of political satire at its very best.

Alexander puts Stowe in the hot seat, surrounded by a quartet of her black characters, protesting the way she told their story. She doesn’t understand. After 140 years, they’re still angry? They still want “affirmative action”?

So Tom, Topsy, Eliza and George proceed to re-enact Stowe’s story with their own, contemporary spin.

Alexander used George Aiken’s dramatization, which toured America nonstop for 35 years during the 19th Century, as the foundation for his own. But this new version strips the story of its evangelical Christianity and adds scenes that apparently didn’t occur to Stowe. For example, Tom teaches Topsy about her African roots. And he fends off advances from the wife of his relatively enlightened owner, St. Clare.

As directed by Daniel Chumley, Stowe’s story is initially acted in a broad style that spoofs the melodramatic genre, interspersed with the characters’ direct commentary on what’s going on from a modern perspective. Likewise, the offstage band interrupts its more antique sounds with African drums and raucous rap.

The commentary finally crashes into the present day and ties up Alexander’s thesis with an enormous wallop.

Yet as the story itself is re-enacted, its melodramatic style is lampooned less and appreciated more. The power of Stowe’s tale comes through loud and clear. It’s precisely because of that narrative potency that Alexander feels so compelled to fully comprehend the subtext as well as the text, to unscramble the mixed signals Stowe’s story has sent over the past 140 years.

Alexander’s Tom (Lonnie Ford) is still noble, but not quite so naive. He initially appears as a shuffling Stepin Fetchit type, but he straightens up when Stowe (Sharon Lockwood) refers to him as “Uncle.” Ford’s deadpans and double takes reveal as much as his words. His essence is not sacrificed; he rejects more militant methods. But his faith in his own role, as a forerunner for generations to come, is evident.

Edris Cooper’s Topsy is an indelible image of spunk and self-loathing, of rage come home to roost. Cooper doubles as Aunt Chloe, the precursor to Aunt Jemima, trying to escape the pancake box. B. W. Gonzalez’s Eliza and Michael Sullivan’s George delve into such issues as color consciousness among blacks, male attitude, and the breakup of the black family.

The set design avoids the excesses of 19th-Century melodrama, perhaps for touring purposes. Most of the spectacle here comes not from special effects but from the ideas, snapping across the stage as sharply as Simon Legree’s whip.

The Mime Troupe received a grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department to present “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle” at Los Angeles Theatre Center next spring. But the collapse of the LATC production company last week apparently endangers prospects for a Los Angeles engagement. In the wake of the Rodney King beating (briefly noted in a slide projection in “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle”) and other incidents of recent weeks, Los Angeles may need this show more than any other city in the country. Here’s hoping that someone figures out how to make that happen.

“I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle,” Lyceum Stage, Horton Plaza, San Diego. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 2. $19-$22. (619) 235-8025. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

‘I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle’

Sharon Lockwood: Harriet Beecher Stowe/Marks/Ophelia

B.W. Gonzalez: Eliza Harris/Jane/Cassy

Michael Sullivan: George Harris

Edris Cooper: Topsy/Aunt Chloe

Lonnie Ford: Uncle Tom

Paul F. Killam: Shelby/St. Clare/Young Shelby

Jim Griffiths: Haley/Simon Legree

Elliot Kavee: Phineas/Skeggs

Guy Totaro: Loker/Mann

Keiko Shimosato: Marie St. Clare/Emmeline

Greta R. Bart: Little Eva

Dred Scott: A Doctor

Dan Hart: Sambo

A San Diego Repertory Theatre presentation of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Adapted by Robert Alexander from George Aiken’s stage version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Directed by Daniel Chumley. Set by Alan Curreri. Costumes by Keiko Shimosato. Lights, stage manager Gregory R. Tate. Music director Elliot Kavee. Music by Kavee, Scott, Hart and others. Additional lyrics by Alexander, Cooper.