THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Jonelle Allen Tackles a Different Role : Actress’s Autobiographical Sketch Is Part of Project Aimed at ‘Giving Back’ to Community

Ever since she can remember, Jonelle Allen has felt a compulsion to perform. When she auditioned for her first New York show--a revival of “The Wisteria Tree,” starring Helen Hayes and Walter Matthau--she was only 5 years old.

The director balked at hiring the precocious tot because of her age. But, according to Allen family legend, she piped up Shirley Temple-style: “Gimme a chance! I can do it!”

She got a role, of course, and Hayes is said to have told Allen’s mother: “Keep this child in the theater--she has a natural gift.”

Recounting the storybook anecdote recently during a break in rehearsals for her latest project--a musical sketch about growing up in Harlem, which she’ll perform at an art gallery here Sunday--Allen rolls her huge brown eyes and laughs heartily. Even the broad peak of a black baseball cap pulled down low over her forehead can’t hide the gleeful animation of her face.

“You just gotta do what you just gotta do,” said the actress, lending emphasis to her sense of thralldom with upturned palms and a sharp shrug of her shoulders.

“You can take theater anywhere,” she added, contrasting the gallery venue with the first-rank theaters she’s worked in. “I call this ‘storefront elegant.’ ”

Allen won’t be earning any money to speak of by performing “Easter on Sugar Hill,” as her sketch is titled. And if the production turns any profit, it won’t measure up to anything like the money she’s made for many years in television, movies and the theater (where she long ago proved Hayes right with a Tony Award nomination, among other accolades).

Indeed, notwithstanding the $15 price of admission, all the performances by the professional artists in the monthly series, which began in March with Mary Anne McGarry’s winning “Honeymoon in Galway,” are intended as labors of love.

“Everybody has carte blanche to create what they want,” said Allen, who launched the project with actress-writer McGarry and invited the collaboration of musicians Patty Amelotte and Mark Turnbull, dancer-choreographer Mel Jackson and actor Douglas Rowe, the former artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse.

“There are some really talented people living in this community. This is a way for them to give something back.”

Allen initially conceived of “Sugar Hill,” the second in the series, as an Easter piece using music and literature from the Harlem Renaissance of the ‘20s and ‘30s. But it soon evolved into a more personal reminiscence.

“When I went looking for what I thought I remembered, I discovered it didn’t really exist,” said Allen, who grew up in the relatively privileged precincts of Harlem’s Sugar Hill during the ‘50s and ‘60s, “I had idealized what I remembered.

“So now the piece talks about me as a child. What I was like up through my teens, what my family was like going back to the Harlem of the ‘40s. That’s why the music and dancing I’m using will be from that period.”

McGarry, who has written a text based on Allen’s stories, will direct the piece. Jackson, who is choreographing with Allen, will be her dance partner. And Turnbull will provide guitar accompaniment.

“We’re all putting it together,” said the trim, late-30ish actress, who plays considerably younger. “But basically it will be me singing and dancing and telling my tale.”

Allen, who noted that her Harlem neighborhood “probably got its name because life was sweet on Sugar Hill,” came to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s with the national touring production of the Tony Award-winning musical “Two Gentlemen From Verona.”

(Her Tony-nominated performance in Galt MacDermot’s 1971 musicalization of the Bard’s comedy was a showstopper first with the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park and then on Broadway.)

Allen, who also was in the original cast of the 1967 Broadway production of “Hair” (another MacDermot musical), stayed in Southern California following the Los Angeles run of “Two Gentlemen” because she wanted to work in television and movies.

And she has never lacked for roles--landing a lead in “Palmerstown, U.S.A.” the Norman Lear/Alex Haley series, as well as featured parts in episodes of “All in the Family,” “Cagney & Lacey,” “Hill Street Blues” and, two weeks ago, “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill.”

She has also starred in all sorts of made-for-TV movies, including “Cage Without a Key” with Susan Dey and “Penalty Phase” with Peter Strauss, as well as the soaps “Berringers” and “Generations.”

“Lately, I’ve been going through a whole vixen period,” quipped Allen, who moved to Laguna Beach 11 years ago to settle down with British-born restaurateur John Sharpe. (They’re divorcing, she said.)

Through all of this activity, however, stage roles have continued to claim her attention.

Allen has played in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” (1977) at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, “Mail” (1987) at the Pasadena Playhouse, “Etta Jenks” (1988) and “A Burning Beach” (1989) at the defunct Los Angeles Theatre Center, where she was an associate artist. Moreover, if not for the fact that she felt “burned out” because of the breakup of her marriage, Allen said, she would have accepted a role offered her in “The Kentucky Cycle,” the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning play that just closed at the Taper.

“In fact,” she added, “the reason I started this series at the Engman is that when my marriage broke up I was torn between moving back to Los Angeles or staying in Laguna.

“Then I realized Laguna is my home. My friends are here. My support is here. The town really has become part of me. There’s a sense of neighborhood, and I just want to add my little contribution.”

“Easter on Sugar Hill” plays at 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. on Sunday at the Engman International art gallery, 326 Glenneyre St., Laguna Beach. $15. (714) 497-7135.