Touching ‘Harriet’s’ Soul

From the history books, Harriet Tubman emerges as a woman from a distant and unimaginable world, a woman whose face is inflexible and scarred and mute with pain. Her saintly deeds only make her seem more remote. In “Harriet’s Return,” a play having its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, Tubman is, in a sense, returned to us warm and alive by Debbie Allen, in the most impressive performance of her acting career.

“Harriet’s Return” is a simple piece of dramaturgy, a straightforward tale that reaches inside its heroine’s thoughts all the way to her soul but only in the most direct and plain-speaking terms. If it is a humble work, it is also a play that demands hubris from its star, who enacts the story and provides the voices for all of the characters (although a quartet of actors, using masks and puppets and sounds but never speaking, embody a host of others).

When Harriet was a child, she imagined the underground railroad as a fancy coach that comfortably took slaves out of their toil and into a lovely place. She grew up to become one of the most famous conductors of that metaphoric railroad, shepherding some 300 people safely to freedom in the years before the Civil War.

Astonishingly, Allen never canonizes Harriet--a pitfall so common to dramas of this kind that one enters the theater expecting to meet a saint with a couple of pasted-on frailties. Playwright Karen Jones Meadows wisely avoids hyperbole and writes simply, allowing Allen to approach Harriet from the inside, not by looking with awe at her deeds and her nobility. Subsequently, she delivers a portrayal of eloquent technique and unaffected beauty.

Allen gives us an energetic child, born into slavery on a Maryland plantation, who understood innately that she and her family were not slaves but “peoples forced to act like slaves.” Harriet was doted on by her mother but severely beaten by her masters for simply being a child. Her reaction to the injustice of those childhood beatings, read in Allen’s fluid eyes, is urgent, deep and as uninterested in self-pity as in self-blame. Those same qualities would help her to run off by herself in the night on a dangerous flight to freedom.

But before she does that, the adolescent Harriet also makes the journey from foolish posturing to giddy love and, later, to heartbreak and bitter knowledge. As a young woman working in the fields, she pines for a free life, and her yearning comes as naturally to her as staying and hoping for the best comes to many others. That is just her calling.

To highlight her internal life, the playwright supplies Harriet with four “voices” who embody, among other flesh-and-blood characters, the voices inside Harriet’s head that guide her to her choices. Under the direction of Kent Gash, this technique veers close to cloying but virtually always manages to remain clean and honest. Artiness invades the production at times, particularly in the opening in which Allen writhes sheathed in a cloth and, at the end, when her exhortation to the audience seems inorganic to the story. But Gash thankfully never lets things get too poetical. Allen’s rooted performance is so sensible and genuine that it allows room for a little posturing without damage.

Courage, leadership and generosity came as naturally to Harriet as breathing, but Allen also simultaneously shows the fear and the cost of the life she lived. In one scene, the childless Harriet finds a lost girl, represented here by a wooden puppet, to whom she becomes extremely attached. When the girl’s parents return, Harriet is so grief-stricken she can barely speak to the girl. In her sorrow, she somehow remembers to thank God for gracing her with the knowledge of what a mother feels. And then she moves on to what needs to be done next.

“Harriet’s Return” is much more interested in these internal struggles and natural gifts than in the fame and acclaim Harriet would eventually win. Yes, she became known as Moses for her bravery and was admired by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. But those facts are what is tacked on in “Harriet’s Return,” not Harriet’s humanity. In a sense, the play imitates its heroine’s pragmatism, and in a particularly moving way.

As an originating producer of the movie “Amistad,” Allen seems to have reached a passionate and committed level in her career that ensures she will be remembered as something more than a frequent choreographer of Academy Awards shows. In “Harriet’s Return,” she shows both a scholar’s respect for time and place and an artist’s instinct for what is human and real.

* “Harriet’s Return,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood, Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Also March 3, 9:30 a.m.; March 4-5, 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; March 6, 8 p.m.; March 7, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends March 7. $27.50-$37.50. (310) 208-5454 or (800) 678-5440. March 3-7: $15 with student ID; for student groups call (310) 208-6500. $15 student rush tickets available at other performances. Running time: 2 hours.

Debbie Allen: Harriet Tubman

With: Seraiah Carol, Kyme, Thomas Corey Robinson, Stephen Smith

Kevin Ricard: Percussionist

A Geffen Playhouse production. By Karen Jones Meadows. Directed by Kent Gash. Sets Tony Fanning. Costumes Paul Tazewell. Lights William H. Grant III. Music James Ingram and Walter Morrison. Percussion arrangements by Kevin Ricard, Chike C. Nwoffiah and Chike Kanayo Omo. Sound Abe Jacob. Production stage manager James T. McDermott.