El Teatro's Zoot Suit portrays the rise of Chicano consciousness in brilliant style.

Photo: Strutting Their Stuff: Remarkable staging and exuberant dance numbers punctuate Zoot Suit.

To put it simply, El Teatro Campesino''s current production of Zoot Suit might be the best show mounted in the tri-county area in the last 15 years. Performances are crisp and memorable, staging runs the gamut from flamboyant to introspective, and there''s brisk dynamic to the pacing that drives an audience through the show without losing control of the play''s nuances. Even more importantly, the show has soul.

Although Luis Valdez''s landmark play was first produced in 1978 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, has been performed around the world and was turned into a feature film in 1981 (starring Edward J. Olmos), this is the first time it has been performed at El Teatro Campesino. And audiences have responded. The show opened in early October, and was originally scheduled to run through November. The run has already been extended twice, and is now scheduled to play through Feb. 9.

On the most surface of levels, Zoot Suit is the fictionalized retelling of the trial of Henry Leyvas and the ensuing Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in the early 1940s.

In August 1942, Leyvas, a Zoot Suiter and acknowledged leader in his 38th Street neighborhood, along with several of his friends are arrested for a murder just outside a popular lovers'' lane known as Sleepy Lagoon. Convicted in a mass trial along with 16 other defendants in January of 1943, Leyvas was sentenced to life in prison at San Quentin. For the next five months, the city of Los Angeles experienced an escalating number of clashes between young Mexican Americans and service personnel. The unrest finally culminated that June with hundreds of servicemen and civilians conducting search-and-destroy raids in the downtown area, targeting "pachuco-looking" young men who were beaten and often stripped of their flamboyant clothing. The zoot suit had become a dangerous symbol. The broad-brimmed hat, long jacket, and pleated pants gathered at the ankle were an emblem for disaffected youth. It marked the wearer as someone who was outside mainstream culture, but part of...something. During the war, a time when most of the country was conserving, the copious fabric needed to create the "drapes" was an act of defiance, a finger thrown in the air to a country that preached equal rights but treated many of its citizens as second-class humans. And it wasn''t just Mexican-Americans who were affected.

While Zoot Suit focuses on what the flamboyant sartorial style meant to Mexican-American, pachuco culture, it''s worth noting that the zoot style had originated in black culture. As the Zoot Suit Riots spread across the country from Los Angeles, blacks were targeted by police along with Hispanics. While the press portrayed the riots as being perpetrated by hoodlums and gangsters, for some of the participants the actions became an entry point into the politics of race. On the West Coast, Cesar Chavez found his way into political activism through zoot culture; in Harlem, so did "Detroit Red"-the man the world would come to know as Malcolm X.

With a story this rich in political context, and as contemporary as racial profiling, it''s easy to find the fire that fuels director Kinan Valdez and his cast in this current production in San Juan Bautista.

Leading the cast are Raul Sabino Cardona as El Pachuco, the play''s narrator and conscience, and Lakin Valdez as Henry Reyna (the fictionalized Leyvas).

Cardona, a silken, sinister threat, plays the pachuco zeitgeist throughout the play. Urging Reyna to care for and rely on only himself, Cardona delivers a performance that''s filled with an existential intensity-so cool that he burns with coldness. As his character preens and struts the stage, Cardona gives his character''s actions two meanings: I''m doing this only for me and I''m doing this because I''m the soul of a people.

As Reyna, Lakin is equally powerful. An acknowledged leader of young people in his neighborhood, Lakin gives the audience a man of strength, who is deviled by anger and bitterness. At the same time that he draws strength from El Pachuco, Lakin shows us the man who is trying to find his own truth, and his own way through a complicated life.

Kinan, son of ETC founder and playwright Luis Valdez and brother of Lakin, mounts a remarkable staging that expands to encompass many exuberant dance numbers (choreographed by Laura Akard) and stylized fight sequences, then contracts to embrace the play''s more intimate moments. In one sequence, with Reyna incarcerated in solitary confinement, El Pachuco shows him the riots that are happening on the streets of Los Angeles. El Pachuco is beaten and stripped, and the lights fade to a small puddle revealing him nearly naked, huddled and cringing on the ground. As a tribal music plays, he rises and moves upstage, wearing only a loincloth, and is silhouetted against a red backlight. It is a very moving moment.

As Reyna''s friends and co-defendants, Josh A. Sanchez, Johnny Mena Martines and Bodie Olmos deliver likable portraits of young men caught up in trouble that''s bigger than they bargained for. Much of the burden for comic relief falls on the shoulders of this trio, and they are up to the task, delivering the laughs without turning their characters into comic roles.

Estrella Esparza gives a heartfelt performance as Alice, the crusader who organizes a campaign to bring the plight of Reyna and his friends to the outside world. In the role of George Shearer, the defense attorney who represents the accused men, Paul Myrvold offers enough laid-back affability, followed by enough anger and hard strength, that it''s possible to believe the street-hardened youth would come to trust him. Myrvold and Lakin pull off one of the play''s more touching moments, in fact, when Shearer is forced to tell the boys that he''s been drafted and must drop their case.

Last Friday''s performance also featured another gem when "understudy" Luis Valdez stepped into the smaller role of Enrique Reyna, Henry''s father. Although Valdez at first crafts a character that seems slightly ineffectual in his ability to control his sons, by the play''s end, he shows us a man who is strong enough to absorb his sons'' pain and anger.

There are so many fine points and performances in this production that it''s impossible to go through them all. Fortu-nately, the extended run offers audiences a chance to experience them first hand.

Zoot Suit plays Thursday through Saturday until Feb. 9 at the El Teatro Campesino Playhouse in San Juan Bautista. Tickets are $12-$20; call 623-2512.