‘Jungle Bells’: Perfect Nearly All the Way

With his hangdog features and affable demeanor, Shabaka Barry Henley brings an immediately appealing everyman persona to “Jungle Bells,” another installment in the Loco Motion Festival at Actors’ Gang Theatre.

Henley’s new work from the Black Theatre Artists Workshop weaves his thoughtful historical reflections on his complicated African American heritage into a quest for the universal in human experience. Though billed as a solo performance piece, Henley is accompanied by a lively ensemble of singers and musicians who provide musical interludes ranging from gospel to blues to opera.

Slipping in and out of an eclectic array of characters with deceptive ease, Henley appears as a former slave, a frenetic disk jockey, a menacing Ku Klux Klansman and even Russian poet Pushkin, who was of mixed racial descent. His masterpiece, however, is a powerful, funny and charismatic portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., who returns from the great beyond to deliver a cautionary sermon against the “lullaby of denial” in present-day race relations.

The piece loses some focus in the less-structured second half, in which Henley adopts a kind of TV talk-show host persona in a free-form exchange with the audience. While his off-the-cuff anecdotes and philosophical asides make some worthwhile points, they’re nowhere near as penetrating as his more carefully scripted segments.

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* “Jungle Bells,” Actors’ Gang Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Today, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m.; Thursday and Nov. 22, 8 p.m.; Nov. 23, 2 and 8 p.m. $15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours.