Revised 'A Brown Tale' is full of joy and mirth

Actor James T. Alfred bounds out of the shadows in "A Brown Tale," dancing to James Brown's "Super Bad." The fancy footwork and the driving, percussive song are introductory tributes to his father, a rolling stone who enlisted in the Marines for two tours in Vietnam, and his mother, a spitfire who praised the lord while smoking joints.

We know all of this because Alfred tells us about his parents, his family and other characters in the Chicago neighborhood where he grew up, then enacts them in "Tale." Alfred's compelling one-act, which opened Saturday at the Capri Theater in Minneapolis, is a big-hearted show that is full of joy and laughter.

"Tale," which premiered a year ago Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul under Lou Bellamy's sharp-eyed direction, has been revised and adapted to a proscenium stage, with Bellamy serving as consultant. The new production is deeper and surer, even if it still has room for refinement.

"Tale" is the first long-run theater piece at the renovated Capri, a 250-seat house that has a big feeling, partly because of its high ceiling.

Alfred, a formidable actor who played Dr. King in "The Mountaintop" and Levee in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" — both produced by Penumbra Theatre at the Guthrie — is both charismatic and solicitous. He invests his "Tale" characters with winning charm, especially since we may not agree with what they're doing and saying.

Through gestures, vocal intonation and tics, he vividly sketches the village that raised him up from the projects to Harvard. His quicksilver turn into characters allows us to see the disciplinarian at the community center who combed the hair of a raggedy boy and the different service customers get from counter workers at McDonald's in black and white neighborhoods.

Alfred's father liked to drink, and to curse. We see the elder man, whose war experience has made him a broken man, dipping his finger in a glass of liquor, tasting it, and approving.

Some of the humor in the scene is self-deprecating, but some of it could be construed as being at the expense of vulnerable youngsters. And that is out of character with the rest of "A Brown Tale," an exciting production that has found a natural home on the North Side.