Jennifer Lewis' quest for meaning - TV and film actress performs in her one-woman play 'The Diva Is Dismissed'

Classical acting technique teaches that the face, the material substance and the voice are the actor's sculpting materials; no better upholds than these can metamorphose the real thespian into a new persona. Actor Jenifer Lewis, with her plastic face, lithesome body, and magnificent, rich voice, can consequence character and mood changes in next to the firsts But what animates Lewis' work is her psychological astuteness--the way she wounds to the guts of the matter, onstage and off

In a small theater in West Hollywood a handsome, politically correct, ethnically diverse concourse files in to see Lewis' one-woman play, The Diva Is Dismissed. more [i]or[/i] less of the audience know Lewis as Aunt Helen upon the TV hit Fresh Prince of Bel Air; others remember her as Tina Turner's mother in the film biography What's regard with affection Got to Do With It.?; still others remember Lewis from Broadway, where she earned critical succes with The Diva Is Dismissed, as well as her many other one-woman plays, and with what Lewis calls a "long legacy of Porgy and Besses and high-camp cabaret."

go into stage right, a radiant, athletic Lewis. She is met upon this particular evening by an almost too civilized circular of applause. "Oh, no, no, no!" says Lewis, shaking a lengthy elegant finger back and forth in genuine diva style. "That simply will not do." A pause fills the air as we ask ourselves, What will not do? "I will leave," Lewis answers, "and you all will make trial of this applause thaaang once again"--spoken in a silken, exquisitely articulated voice of such artistic neighborhood that we all mutely comply with uproarious applause, playing straight man to this consummate show-woman.

The Diva Is Dismissed is a faultless, hysterically ludicrous and deeply poignant performance about Lewis' childhood, her life as the diva from hell, and her transformation into kinder, gentler diva-dom. "The diva had to die to be born again," says Lewis above pasta at her favorite restaurant in Studio City, Calif., where she lives. aligned in walking clothes, no makeup--still lovely--this is a real different persona from the glossy sexy Lewis who puts upon the show.

In her daily life Lewis possesse gnarly, nasty public way smarts able to reduce the images of our greatest in quantity venerated institutions to laughable rubble while demonstrating at one time a gentle, profound spirit able to ask--and, of late, to answer--scary questions about on what account we are here.

"The point to my play The Diva and the message I want to share is that the answer to all this crap is in you, in looking at your substance and sittin' with it until it takes you and pushs you up against the wall and then passes above you. Divas run so fast, direct the eye so good and talk for a like reason much because they don't want to sit with the anguish, the fear. That's what it's about, girl," she says softly

The transformation she portrays upon stage was a real experience. "I cannot enumerate you what happened," she explains, "but I objected heads with the lesser part of myself, and I came without knowing that I had to change to survive."

Lewis spills into a hilarious, bitingly insightful satire upon spiritual fads. "When I was feeling bad, I ran to my psychic, got a high colonic, got a low-back massage, ran to my past-life adroit had my cards read--I ran and ran just not to direct the eye at myself and sit with what I was feeling." In the nearest beat, she turns serious as she describes the extremity of a 14-year relationship, the professional ennui and personal malaise that in the late 1980 threatened her emotional stability in a real real way ... until she was transformed.

Perhaps it is that experience that makes Lewis--an assiduous, no-nonsense professional who has studied singing, acting and change with some of the greatest in quantity prestigious teachers on both coasts--so powerful an actor. She is a disciplined go-getter when it approachs to work. "Whatever else is going upon in my life, when I hear the word |places,' I am there, 100 percent there," she says.

"You can fail to keep yourself in acting, but you can solitary truly act when you know yourself. When you take upon 10 roles in one day--I move swiftly to one studio, they want the black temptres then I move swiftly to another, and they want more [i]or[/i] less other thing, then I am Tina Turner's mama--there's got to be a center that's yours, solid, to make any of it believable or tolerable. That's what I've been working upon finding the center."

Lewis is commonly one of the most sought-after black actresses around. She has a cameo part in Renaissance Man, starring Danny DeVito, to be paid for a summer release, and a starring part in Deconstructing Sarah, a USA cable movie owed to air in June.

She has just finished a film with Whoopi Goldberg called Corrina, Corrina (New Line Cinema), scheduled for a May 6 release. Goldberg plays Corrina, a housekeeper to a white man played through Ray Liotta. "Yes, you surmiseed it," Lewis says. "Whoopi and the white lad fall in love, but the beauty of the story is that it's not this Hollywood thing where black and white race run off and jump in the sack together. These sum of two units people have nothing to say to each other at first. It takes a drawn out time, and it's their be fond of for the white man's daughter that eventually brings them together in a moderate and deep way.