Living Up to a Legend : * Stage: Avery Brooks tries to capture the essence of the great American black in the title role of ‘Paul Robeson.’

If Paul Robeson hadn’t actually lived and had been concocted instead in a playwright’s imagination, he’d fall into the category of hoary myth and no serious actor would play him.

Few serious actors could play him even if they wanted to. Robeson (1898-1976) was a giant in all particulars. He was powerful enough to become the country’s first black All-American football player (at Rutgers, where he also made Phi Beta Kappa). He had a window-rattling basso profundo singing voice, which rang with his earthy sorrow and his pity, and for most of his life, his spiritual joy.

He was the greatest “Othello” of America’s early to mid-20th Century, and Broadway’s premier black actor-singer of his time. He started big and kept growing. An Ivy League tradition and New York law practice couldn’t contain him. He outgrew a single country’s borders, and became the toast of Europe and the Soviet Union. He even outgrew his time, and finally ran afoul of ‘50s American racism and political paranoia, where he at last found himself overmatched. He was the greatest 20th-Century African-American never to be embraced by the postwar civil-rights movement.

Capturing him onstage is a tall order for any playwright and actor, but in “Paul Robeson,” at the Westwood Playhouse through Feb. 2, Philip Hayes Dean has filled in the biographical contours, and Avery Brooks gives us the outsized resonant figure.

“It’s a different notion to play someone who walked on the earth,” Brooks says. “There’s another kind of responsibility to do justice to someone who actually lived. I think Robeson’s story is most like that of Malcolm X. It was an American odyssey. When you think of where he began and the number of metamorphoses he made, it’s an extraordinary journey.

“It took him around the planet. When you think of someone who did so much in contemporary history who was then vilified, hounded and harassed . . . Politics notwithstanding, the beacon he represented for African people should not be forgotten. You can’t think of any movement today he didn’t influence, civil rights, labor, freedom for the artist--he represented them all.”

Brooks has the requisite physical size for Robeson. At nearly 6 foot 2 with a powerful upper torso, in the parlance of pro sports he “plays big” and has the voice to match, rich, cavernous, thrilling.

“I’ve seen him go from being a good actor to becoming a great actor,” says playwright Dean (“Robeson” first played Broadway in 1978 with James Earl Jones; Brooks has been playing it for 10 years). “He’s achieved what Stanislavsky called the actor’s ‘higher consciousness.’ ”

“I was born in Evansville, Ind.,” said Brooks. “My parents are from Mississippi. My father was a singer in a famous gospel choir called Wings Over Jordan. He also worked as a tool and die setter for International Harvester. He was a fine athlete. He was recruited by the Harlem Globetrotters. He played baseball too, in the Negro League.

“My mother was a musical prodigy and taught music for 40 years--her mother had been a music teacher ahead of her. She was an extraordinary person. When my brother was born in Evansville, the whole community came by to see the first-born. It’s as though she was mother to thousands. She found time for everyone. I’m lucky if I can live up in some small way to what they’ve given me.”

Brooks was dressed in a windbreaker with bright, patchwork colors, blue jeans and alligator-skin cowboy boots. His strong jaw and close-cropped haircut give him the coolly severe, don’t-mess-with-me demeanor that served him as Hawk in the TV series “Spenser for Hire.”

Most actors locked into a demanding role like to get as far away as possible from their character when they aren’t playing it. Away from “Robeson” however, Brooks does not cut a casual figure. There’s an element of Robeson’s persona that carries into the formality of Brooks’ speech and demeanor. He lectures on black theater history and the non-Western theater tradition at Rutgers --where he’s taught for nearly 20 years--which means that the black cultural and political condition remains uppermost in his mind.

What becomes apparent after a short time spent with Brooks is that the same anger and pride are banked in him the way they must have smoldered in Robeson himself. For Brooks, “Robeson” isn’t just a great role, it’s a culminating experience.

He spoke of an uncle, for example: “He was a chemist at the University of Chicago and became a merchant seaman. The one place he never wanted to go was back down South. ‘Why would God give us brains and not let us use them in these circumstances?’ he’d say. I was always aware of growing up in that emotion of struggle.”

The history of music and struggle is rooted in Brooks’ family, and has afforded him keys to unlocking Robeson’s persona.

“My uncle was in the Delta Rhythm Boys and wrote the lyrics for ‘Take the A Train.’ My mother’s father was fluent in German and Latin. His name was Travers Crawford and he was the first baccalaureate to graduate from Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He was a tenor, and a newspaper editor in the ‘20s. I’ve talked to my aunts and uncles about him. He tried so hard, but his spirit was eventually broken. I never thought of this before, but he was a lot like Robeson.” Brooks had a fairly precocious youth. As a high-schooler, he was invited to study acting at the Hampton Institute in Virgina (the family had moved to Gary, Ind.). For a while he thought he’d be a linguist, and studied Spanish at a school in Monterrey, Mexico. He was a member of Rutgers’ first MFA class in theater. Later, he became part of the black theater Renaissance of the ‘70s, working at the New York Public Theater and at Douglas Turner Ward’s Negro Ensemble Company. He currently lives in New Brunswick, N.J., with his wife and three children.

If, as an actor, Brooks has had to discover Robeson in himself, he’s also discovered himself in Robeson. “I’ve experienced moments where I’ve felt frightened. The word fright has crept into my vocabulary to go with the word why . You can’t grow up without feeling the pervasive and unspoken racism that exists. I’m saying that you feel it just going to a gas station, just doing everyday things. It’s the way you’re perceived. I cannot explain it to my children. It’s haunted me more recently, playing Robeson.”

Brooks is quick to add: “This happens to be a play about an American, or an African-American, but this is theater too. If by the end of the evening we haven’t been able to shed these layers and get to the core of a human experience, we haven’t done the job. If it isn’t a human story, it has no value.”

To the question “Why isn’t Robeson prominent in the modern pantheon of African-American heroes?,” Brooks replied: “Robeson was very courageous for the way he tried to restore his name. But he was never forgiven for the statement he made at the Paris Peace Conference when he said--I’m paraphrasing--that he found it inconceivable that American Negroes should go to war on behalf of people who’d oppressed them for centuries, especially against the Soviet Union, which accepted them. He was misquoted, but for some reason he never attempted to correct it. McCarthyism destroyed a lot of careers. It was something you couldn’t recover from.

“But you can’t comment on Robeson without saying, ‘Here is a man who cared about humanity deeply--period,’ ” he said. Then his neck stiffened pridefully.

“It’s the sum of everything I know. This is the sum of everything I am up until this very moment.”