‘WARREN’S STORY’ HIGHLIGHTS WOLFE CRYING UNCLES

SAN DIEGO —  The inevitable question, the one that Kedric Robin Wolfe expects and doesn’t want to answer is, of course, just how true is “Warren’s Story,” the one-man, three-generational saga he is performing in the Lyceum Space through Sept. 6.

He did, after all, write the story from the perspective of someone named Kedric Wolfe who, like himself, happens to be from a farm in Canton, Ohio. But was there also an Uncle Warren, the almost mythically strong-fisted uncle who, when things aren’t right, “doesn’t mess around?”

Wolfe gets into lotus position--”the world’s most comfortable chair”--and sighs.

“I’m always questioned . . . what part is true, what part is partly true, what part is fabrication?

“There’s nothing here that hasn’t happened to human beings somewhere in our human family. In that sense every jot is the truth.”

Finally, after prodding, Wolfe comes across with the goods.

“Yes, there really was an Uncle Warren.”

There also turns out to have been an Uncle Kenny whose personality is the larger part of Warren’s in the story. Get Wolfe started on Uncle Kenny and suddenly it become clear that all those stories in “Warren’s Story” are just chips off the mother lode.

There was the time Kenny was on a bus in England during World War II and the bombs fell. Women and children were supposed to evacuate first, but a big guy jumped up and started pushing them aside as he scrambled to get out.

“When he reached Kenny, he (Kenny) went bam! and knocked him down cold.”

Kenny was always that way, according to Wolfe. When Kenny was 12, he found out that a man who didn’t want children to toboggan down his hill spread ashes on the slide, ruining it.

“Kenny went to the guy’s house and punched him. In the face. A grown man.”

With Uncle Kenny, Wolfe explains, “you asked for it, you got it. No hesitation. He was like a pit bull. That was his personality.”

It is a personality that, in Wolfe’s hands, leaps out fully formed on stage, a man who can’t be defeated by anything less than 200 volts of electricity or a bolt of lightning from the heavens.

It is also a personality that leaped off the page for Wolfe.

“I had the experience that this (piece) was given to me. It’s not that I sat down and said I’ll write something. It just went click.”

Wolfe never set out to be a writer. For 15 years he’s been acting in Los Angeles--some movie spots here, TV there and lots of commercials (His best-known one to date is as the passenger on an airline who twists himself into a pretzel to fit into a seat).

Even now, the shows he writes are for himself, not for others. They were motivated, he said, by a desire to “write and cast myself in roles that no one else would cast me in.”

He wrote his first piece for Scott Kelman, founder and director of Pipeline Theater, five years ago.

Kelman, who characterizes himself as a person who “reads people, not plays,” was not interested in Wolfe’s credits when he met him.

“In most actors I see craft and not enough humanity,” Kelman said. What he was looking for was “a person with a vision. A person who has a very strong sense of self . . . so that the person himself comes through a character . . . and you feel you know (the person) at the end of the play.”

He found what he was looking for when Wolfe told him the story of what he did after the Watergate scandal broke. He dressed up as an angel in white robe and wings and traveled to Washington with a golden broom to “clean up” the White House.

On hearing that, Kelman told Wolfe he would produce him.

Doing what? Wolfe asked.

“I don’t know. Just do Kedric.”

The result was “Ah, Kedric!” which has since been retitled “Blind Stab,” a carrousel of information, transformation and social comment on Western culture and nuclear danger. It played 10 months in Los Angeles, where it recently reappeared as part of the Angel’s Flight series at The Museum of Contemporary Art’s new Ahmanson Auditorium.

Two more pieces followed. “Warren’s Story” emerged when Wolfe was working on a monologue for a production Kelman had titled “The Liar’s Club.”

The idea was to come up with an obvious lie, convincingly told.

Instead, he started thinking about his Uncles Warren and Kenny.

He got up the next day and wrote the story in a week.

“It was easy. When I would get to a blind alley, I would wait a moment and then I would see the turn.”

But it was not what he needed for “The Liar’s Club.” For that he went back and wrote a piece called “Black” in which he asserted that he (a slender white man) was really a big black woman.

“Warren’s Story” opened the next year in 1985 under Kelman’s direction.

From the beginning, not only the script but also the set has suggested verisimilitude.

Wolfe co-designed the stage with Alex Wright to include Wolfe’s own welding equipment and barber’s chair as well as a water pump similar to the one he knew in the farm kitchen of his childhood.

So is it fact or fiction? Kelman looked at Wolfe, who wore an inscrutable expression, smiled and shrugged. He said he has never asked Wolfe that question.

“I don’t know if it’s all facts, but it’s all true.”

And for those who are still wondering about Uncles Warren and Kenny, they are alive and well and living in Ohio.

“I sent my Uncle Warren the reviews,” Wolfe said. “I said he is a hero in California. He got a big kick out of it.”