STAGE REVIEW : Too Many Laughs Gives ‘Delta’ an Off-Key Note : Old Globe: Production is a comic version of Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s rich and sensitive tone poem that is laced with humor.

Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s approach to civil rights and self-determination is as unexpected as snow in July.

Most of the other 20th-Century African-American women who have loudly proclaimed their place in the world--Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker--have had their share of quirky stories to tell. But Holland’s rise from the real and figurative mud of her native Greenwood, Miss., into enlightenment was through the longest and darkest tunnel.

She has chronicled the tale in “From the Mississippi Delta,” a three-person play that blew into Los Angeles like a bracing offshore wind two years ago, as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s Literary Cabaret at the Itchey Foot Ristorante. Since then, “Delta” has been many places, including off-Broadway, and it surfaces now at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

The text remains mercifully unchanged, but this production is the comic version of what, at the time, had seemed like a rich and sensitive tone poem laced with humor. A new director and cast make the difference. It is not necessarily an improvement.

“Delta” is a textured, even stark, collection of recollections, forthright, unvarnished and set down with a deft hand, a terrific ear for the African-American vernacular and a great, impetuous sense of the ridiculous. It does not suggest slathering on the comedy.

While this shift in emphasis is director Seret Scott’s clear and articulated choice, it pushes things perilously close to caricature. “Delta” acknowledges life’s humor even in the darkest hours. It does not accuse it of being ludicrous. Quite the reverse.

It kicks off with a brutal demonstration of rape by a white man when Holland was barely 11. It graphically depicts her mother’s agonizing death by fire when the house was firebombed by suspected Ku Klux Klanners in retribution for her daughter’s activism. It pays homage to that mother, the principled Aint Baby, who pulled herself up out of poverty to become a midwife--or, as she was known later for the magic in her healing hands, “The Second Doctor Lady.”

The fun comes in the tall tales, like the one about Miss Rosebud Dupree’s obsession with her water meter, or Holland’s fling as a stripper manquee with a talent for blowing smoke rings that makes her the talk of the town.

When her life intersects with the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s, her own revolution sets in. A sudden thirst for knowledge impels her northward to the frozen tundras of Minneapolis. There, mirabile dictu, she learns to appreciate a burning KKK cross for the warmth it provides--and she discovers a whole new definition of self-assertion among the denizens of a jumpin’ joint down by the depot.

This is uncommon autobiography about rites of passage colliding with civil rights and each magnificently informing the other. All three performers--Saundra Quarterman, Pamala Tyson and Cheryl Lynn Bruce--play all of the roles, frequently overlapping, though never into confusion.

The attractive, pliant Quarterman stands out for the playful, peripatetic vivacity of all her portrayals. Bruce, who projects great stillness and spiritual force as Aint Baby, can also be very funny as other people. Her Rosebud Dupree is a study in clenched ignorance and her Bro Pastor, the minister with an inside track to God who officiates at Aint Baby’s funeral, is a subtle sketch in amiable self-importance.

But the person who repeatedly steals the show is Tyson, and that is not especially good news. Tall and lanky, with big saucer eyes that she likes to accentuate and a recessive chin that she pulls in even deeper, Tyson is super-savvy about her physique’s comic potential. She doesn’t look at you, she clamps her eyes on you. She doesn’t walk, she lopes--feet upturned like Olive Oyl, lifting those knobby knees up to her eyeballs and cutting a wide swath as she whips around those long hands and skinny arms.

This is a hugely talented comedian who deserves to make it big, but her attributes here are overused and her excesses out of place. Holland’s writing is vigorous enough to withstand such a broad farcical onslaught, but its lyricism is undermined and its seriousness diminished by such a pronounced comic take. You couldn’t tell it to the opening night audience, however, which lapped it all up.

Ralph Funicello’s primitive plank setting, Ashley York Kennedy’s filtered lighting and costumer Robert Wojewodski’s plain shifts serve the production better than the in-the-round staging at the Carter. It’s a trade-off.

What you lose in sightlines you recapture in intimacy, which this show requires. If Scott would remember that and apply a miniaturist’s restraint to the action, Holland’s exquisite truth in art might positively flourish.

* “From the Mississippi Delta,” Old Globe Theatre, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 25. $21.50-$30; (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Saundra Quarterman Woman One

Pamala Tyson Woman Two

Cheryl Lynn Bruce Woman Three

An Old Globe Theatre presentation. Director, Seret Scott. Playwright, Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland. Set, Ralph Funicello. Lights, Ashley York Kennedy. Costumes, Robert Wojewodski. Sound, Jeff Ladman. Stage manager, Jerome J. Sheehan. Assistant stage manager Julie Baldauff.