STAGE REVIEW : A Legacy of Racial Poison : Company of CharActors Theatre delivers a fiery production of ‘Black Water Risin’ ’ despite the play’s flaws.

The racial drama “Black Water Risin’ ” is to theater what the pulp novel was to literature. That is, it’s lurid, raucous, melodramatic and visceral.

Those are qualities hard to resist, making this play at the Company of CharActors Theatre in Studio City a barn burner from beginning to end, despite its flaws. That’s largely due to the leading performer and director, Herb Mitchell, who plays a Bull Connor-type of sheriff interrogating a black man who is cuffed to a chair in his office for the rape and murder of a white girl in the pre-civil rights South of 1957.

Playwright Dutch Parker has not written an artful play. He’s guilty of overkill in the monstrous figure of the sheriff, contrived plot conveniences and a didactic moral tone, which gets downright preachy at the end. But, happily, the production crackles with electricity nonetheless.

From the moment the curtain goes up, subtleties are thrown out the window. Given the charged level of the playing, there’s something bracing about these in-your-face theatrics. We are, after all, observing a standoff between innocence and evil, between a burly, angry black man (the excellent Mike Colt), who knows he doesn’t stand a chance to avoid the electric chair, and the racial hatred of a system that’s found its apotheosis in the dung heap of a sheriff who boasts of having killed a civil-rights activist from the North.

Strong supporting actors propel events. They include the affecting Anthony Leonardi as a liberal-minded deputy sheriff, Karen Abercrombie as a passionate mother who bursts into the office to protect her son, Carole Carmody as the frowzy village eyewitness and Karl Lucht as a snotty, bigoted deputy who turns out to be something quite different than he seems.

But at the churning center of this caldron is Mitchell’s explosive sheriff, whose satanic bulk, sneering mouth and smiling eyes convey the legacy of racial poison in the South and, by extension, the abuse of power and racism everywhere.

Rodney G. King, the L. A. riots and the recent release of “Malcolm X” help to make the production more relevant and less dated than it might otherwise appear in this era of political correctness. Colt as the suspect sometimes even sounds like Malcolm X--a stretch, considering that the character can’t read or write. But you accept the excesses because there’s a flame burning here--in the rawness of the writing and the performing--that will not be extinguished.

Contributing to the impact of what turns into a hostage drama is set designer Jim Hinkelman’s grimy Macon County station interior and the musty atmosphere created by Lawrence Oberman’s lighting.

Where and When What: “Black Water Risin’.” Location: Company of CharActors Theatre, 12655 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 20. Price: $12. Call: (213) 466-1767.