You've heard about that village it takes to raise a child? The five slaves on an 1858 Savannah plantation in "Flight" are that village. But they do a lot more than that.

Charlayne Woodard's new play with music, now at City Theatre, dramatizes that village through its use of story. Stories are rooted so deep in human culture because they don't just entertain but also educate, nurture and protect -- or oppress and divide. They have power.

We know this. We don't need scholars like Bruno Bettelheim to tell us that folklore, legends, fairy tales and myths help a culture articulate what it believes important, the function that is triply central to "Flight."

First, the play's content is a series of these nurturing stories. Second, storytelling is its central action, in which the slave community tells stories to heal and strengthen a young boy whose mother has just been sold as punishment for teaching him to read -- which is to say, for dreaming of flight. Third, like "The Decameron," Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and other story compilations, the whole play seeks to initiate the audience into communal mysteries, to fit us for the future.

Woodard's tales are African American, with a heavy debt to Mother Africa. For a people denied writing and their own music and religion, as slaves were, stories are freighted with even greater significance.

Tony Ferrieri's set is made up of a stage floor layered, like the stories, and dominated by a giant tree. Up there the unseen, Little Jim is hiding after seeing his mother, Sadie, chained and hauled off to the auction block. In this tenuous refuge near the slave quarters, the five gather to persuade Little Jim down from the tree. They're convened by Oh Beah, a strong, maternal healer, and include field hand Nate, Sadie's husband and Little Jim's father.

Nate wants to take bloody revenge, so the first order of business is to calm him, and it takes a while before he joins the group project to comfort his son. The early stories start in the mythic past, dealing with the origin of day and night and how God made man and woman and how (thanks also to a female Devil, who isn't as bad as God would have it) they emerged with different strengths.

Gradually, just as in Ovid, the stories move out of myth into history and to the present. We hear how Nate was taken from his mother at age 9 because of a gambling debt, and how he met and married Sadie.

Perhaps the most telling parable is that of two sisters, one of whom ends up as servant to the other until recognition sets both free -- itself a recognition of the historic African role in slavery of other Africans but also of the good and bad in us all. You see this also in plantation blacksmith Ezra's realization that he forged the shackles placed on Sadie, and in gardener Alma's admission that, through jealousy, she didn't give Sadie a timely warning.

As to that title, it refers to flight from and flight toward, but also airborne flight, as in the title parable, one of magical escape from bondage in which some are left behind. "We left behind to witness the miracle," one says.

It's lovely material, performed with earnestness and skill. But it's not simple. Lurking in its nooks are many debates about how much to go along with the oppressor for survival's sake and how to balance personal and group responsibility.

And the nature of such folkloric material is that it can come perilously close to stereotype, because stereotypes also contain some truth. The actors have to embrace such potential stereotypes -- many imposed by whites -- as the all-wise mother, the feckless young man or the Uncle Tom, in order to discover their truth and move on.

I have some difficulty with the relationship of the stories to the frame. The sympathetic story of Little Jim is a pretty obvious solution to a dramaturgical problem, i.e., why are these people telling these stories? Still, if you enter imaginatively into the play's mixed realistic/spiritual world, the stereotypes yield truths which test their truths. For this, thanks to director Liesl Tommy and her cast.

Its heart is Avery Sommers' expansive, commanding Oh Beah, a veritable Aunt Ester in her prime. But the two younger women gradually grow in significant presence -- Taifa Harris' Alma, who ranges from deviltry to irony to passion, and DeWanda Wise's Mercy, who displays astonishing variety, emotional and physical.

In fact, like any sane critic I'd like to go on record that Wise, for whom this is her professional stage debut, should have a luminous career ahead.

Kevin Brown, long a Pittsburgh stalwart, makes his City debut as Ezra, putting his earthy strength and fine voice on display; and who could play so funny and wry a God? Joshua Elijah Reese excels as the handsome, passionate Nate.

Reese and Wise have a further function: although we never see Little Jim or his mother, we experience them through Nate, who is Jim grown up, and Mercy, who has Sadie's feisty strength.

George Jones provides the live African percussion, which supports the songs (credit composer Karl Fredrik Lundeberg and music director Thomas Douglas) and the choreography of Oronde Sharif. Special thanks to Marcus Doshi's atmospheric lighting.

The play is set in 1858, on the verge of the great upheaval that will change these lives, freeing them from slavery into an oppression more amorphous, then advancing them on the flight into the future on which they are already imaginatively engaged.