Playing the Theater of the Mind : After five decades onstage, Julie Harris is stepping up to the mike with a boundless sense of energy for radio productions of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and Athol Fugard’s ‘The Road to Mecca.’

Famously petite Julie Harris, one of the leading ladies of American theater, stands near a microphone in the basement recording studio of KCRW radio in Santa Monica.

She is dressed in a tweedy brown jacket, with red glasses framing blue eyes that peer out from beneath a silver-blond pageboy. The look is gentle yet businesslike.

But when she begins to speak, the voice of the dream-bound Amanda Wingfield, the mother in “The Glass Menagerie,” pours forth in a Southern-tinged aria.

“What is going to become of us?” she implores. “What is the future?”

Away from the mike and out of her Amanda persona, Harris isn’t one to dwell on the past. She may be a veteran of five decades onstage, but at 70, she’s showing no signs of slowing down.

The winner of five Tony Awards, two Emmys and more, Harris was recently in L.A. to tape a BBC-KCRW/L.A. Theatre Works co-production of the Tennessee Williams masterwork. It will air--along with a companion production of Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart”--on the BBC and National Public Radio this spring.

With Harris in the studio were Zeljko Ivanek, Kevin Kilner and Calista Flockhart, all of whom were cast members of the New York-based Roundabout Theatre’s Tony Award-winning production of the play last season.

Next up, Harris can be seen, along with Amy Irving and Harris Yulin, in the L.A. Theatre Works’ live radio theater staging of Athol Fugard’s “The Road to Mecca” Wednesday through Saturday at the Doubletree Guest Suites hotel in Santa Monica. The play will air subsequently on KCRW-FM (89.9) on a date yet to be announced.

Like the trouper she is, Harris still can’t turn down a good role, let alone two of them. And that, she says, is what brought her to Los Angeles from her Cape Cod home.

“It was the plays themselves,” says the actress during a lunch-break interview on the Santa Monica College campus, where KCRW is located. “I’ve had a long love affair with ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ And I really adore Athol Fugard’s work and I have always wanted to do one of his plays. It’s miraculous theater.”

Born in Michigan and educated at the Yale School of Drama, Harris made her Broadway debut in “It’s a Gift” in 1945. Her first major success came in 1950, with her portrayal of the 12-year-old tomboy Frankie, opposite Ethel Waters, in Harold Clurman’s staging of Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding.”

Then 24, she spent 1 1/2 years in the role on Broadway. And when the play was made into a film, Harris was nominated for an Oscar for her efforts.

In 1954, she appeared on-screen as James Dean’s girlfriend in “East of Eden.”

Yet despite numerous film and TV roles since--including a seven-year stint on the CBS nighttime soap “Knots Landing,” ending in 1987-- Harris has always been primarily a woman of the theater.

She has toured extensively--particularly in William Luce’s 1976 “The Belle of Amherst,” a one-woman play about Emily Dickinson, for which Harris won a Tony. In 1992, she appeared on Broadway in “Lucifer’s Child,” a play about Danish writer Isak Dinesen.

She has also worked with L.A. Theatre Works previously on several occasions, in part because of her love for radio drama. “What’s exciting to me about doing a play for radio is that it really commands such a lasting audience,” she says. “People can hear the production 50 years from now.”

Radio drama also requires a particular strategy on the part of the artist. “It’s a very interesting challenge for the actor,” Harris says. “The energy [required] is as if you’re in a theater, but you can’t quite do it that way because you have to be intimate enough for the radio.”

Absent the physicality of a live production, Harris says, the voice must express more. “It’s mostly vocal,” she says. “You’re not on a stage and having to reach a lot of people, so it’s just as intimate as you and I talking.”

And yet actors must conjure just as much, if not more, in their heads. “Your response to the play is the same as it is on the stage,” Harris says. “The core of what you’re feeling is the same.

“In your imagination, if someone slaps, you can feel the slap,” she continues. “If you have to fall down on the bed and wail, you do that in your mind. The physical things you have to have in your mind and go through in a way.”

For “The Glass Menagerie,” Harris and her fellow cast members had the luxury of being able to draw upon their experiences onstage. “We’re aware of where people might laugh,” she says. “But if you haven’t done the play, then you don’t know exactly how the audience is going to react.”

With the Fugard work, however, Harris will have no such history at her disposal. Instead, she’ll rely on her own personal response to the story of the relationship between a young woman (Irving) and Miss Helen (Harris), a widowed sculptor living in the arid Great Karroo region of South Africa.

“This is a particularly extraordinary play for me at this time,” Harris says. “If you reach a certain age and you’ve been full of inspiration and ideas, suddenly you say, ‘Maybe I have 10, 15 or 20 years more--what do I want to do?’

“Miss Helen has lost her way because she’s finished her life’s work and now she finds this desert in herself and it makes her very sad. She’s lost the inspiration of her life.

“That happens to us because of one thing and another, especially growing old,” Harris continues. “I relate to that. But I must say, there is something very childish in me that says, ‘Maybe I’ll be different and I’ll live a long, long, long time.’

“I really feel as though maybe I’ll be lucky.”

* “The Road to Mecca,” Doubletree Guest Suites, 1707 4th St., Santa Monica. Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m. $22-$25. (310) 827-0889.