From Ghana to L.A.: A ‘Spirit Awakening’

With apologies to the Ebony magazine look, Akuyoe disdains soft, flowy black hairstyles or “dyed, fried and chemicalized hair” (to quote “The Colored Museum”).

As the Ghana-born writer-actress-educator muses aloud in her one-woman stage journey, “Spirit Awakening,” opening Thursday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Akuyoe knows “the strength of each tight curl on her head.”

Her personal transformation from a woman sublimating her black identity in order to move in a white world to finally rediscovering herself in Hollywood, of all places, is at the heart of her critically acclaimed show.

In the production, which she has refined and deepened since its Equity Waiver premiere in Hollywood last year, she mercurially effects several dialects and idioms, playing characters both male and female, much as Charlayne Woodard did in “Pretty Fire” and Chaz Palminteri in “The Bronx Tale.”

It hasn’t been easy for a black woman pursuing an acting career to drop the silky coiffeur. “I’m sure my features have cost me work,” said Akuyoe, who has appeared in CBS’ “Picket Fences,” several TV movies and the play “Widows,” in 1991, at the Mark Taper Forum. “As an actress, I’m not opposed to wearing wigs, but, off-stage, I am opposed to changing my hair to fit someone’s idea of who I am.

“But in taking this stand, I’m not trying to be a role model,” said the tall, 34-year-old former royal African princess, whose mother uprooted her from Ghana at the age of 6 in an identity-shattering move to the white Western world, where the little girl “felt like a speck of pepper in a sea of salt.” “Wearing my hair natural and kinky is all about a spiritual--as opposed to political--awakening,” explained Akuyoe as she toyed with a spinach salad during an interview in Larchmont Village.

Akuyoe is also well known as a rehabilitator-storyteller through her “Spirit Awakening” educational workshops in inner-city schools, prisons, juvenile halls and work camps for teen-agers, which she conducts with funding from state and county grants.

“When I go into these places, especially the schools, and see black kids in pain over their kinky hair and their very darkness, I know exactly what they’re feeling. I work with them to express their lives by unmasking what I call their authentic voice,” said Akuyoe (which means “blessed woman” in her native tongue).

According to both the County Probation Department and the State Department of Corrections, Akuyoe has been wildly successful in dealing with incarcerated minors. According to Deputy Probation Officer Gregory James of Camp Afflerbaugh, a juvenile detention center in La Verne: “The response of our minors this summer to Akuyoe has been so overwhelming that many began crying due to their deep emotional healing that was taking place. In my four years, I have never experienced anything like it.”

In fact, Akuyoe’s recent three-week workshop at Camp Afflerbaugh for 16 youths aged 15-18 wound up producing a book of the youths’ own work called “Voices of the Soul,” with support from the Earth Trust Foundation.

She’s also providing free admission to the homeless for “Spirit Awakening,” which is being staged in the LATC’s more intimate Theatre 4, with organizational help from the nearby L.A. Mission and other shelters. Proceeds from the three-week stand will help support her workshops.

On the horizon are plans to make a movie from “Spirit Awakening”--”not a one-woman movie, of course, but full of character actors. I have a producer pitching it around”--and a visit to Rome later this year, to see her uncle, Ghana’s ambassador to Italy.

Akuyoe’s odyssey from “emotionally chilly London” to the street rhythms of New York (at the age of 11) brought her to Hollywood just four years ago; she laughs at the thought of her blizzard of adjustments.

“Moving from the drums of Ghana to Mozart symphonies in Europe with a divorced Ghanian aristocrat for a mom taught me right away about opposing cultures,” she said with a grin. “The English were awfully snooty to me.”

Once settled in New York, where she attended the High School for the Performing Arts and later lived what she concedes was “a pretty fast life,” Akuyoe studied acting with some of the best teachers--Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof and, her favorite, Sanford Meisner.

“There are African/European/American presences in me, and right now I’m entering into my African phase again. I can feel it in the movement in my body, in how I’m enjoying my dance classes.”

Other black actresses such as Angela Bassett and Alfre Woodard are friends, but with her performance-workshop priorities, she’s driven in a slightly different direction.

“I believe that every child is born with an essential piece of the word-puzzle--and either we assist them or we pay a very high price.”

* “Spirit Awakening,” LATC, 514 S. Spring St., Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 4 p.m. Ends Aug. 29. $12. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes (no intermission). Akuyoe will also speak in a program for the L.A. Festival at 8 p.m. Aug. 27 at the Vision Complex in Leimert Park.