Strom lives!

The late, legendary U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond returns tonight as the star of “Strom in Limbo,” a world-premiere play opening at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg.

“Drama is the best teaching tool — it is storytelling,” said director and theater professor George Roberts, 41, who says he wants both Thurmond, who died in 2003, and segregation’s bygone days to come alive in the play.

At turns funny and poignant, the two-hour play has a simple plot:

Thurmond dies. He is turned away from heaven’s gates. His 22 years of advocating white supremacy doom his soul. Instead, he will go to hell.

Thurmond demands an appeal. After all, he did help many blacks during his life. He goes before a celestial court. Its chief justice is the spirit of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Thurmond argues he should go to heaven. “It makes no sense,” he exclaims. “The longest-serving senator in the United States Senate isn’t going to heaven?”

An unnamed Devil’s Advocate — played by former professional actor and real-life lawyer Rodney Bonds — argues hell is the perfect place for him.

“What if, by some miracle, Thurmond had won?” asks the Devil’s Advocate, speaking of Thurmond’s 1948 bid for president on a segregation ticket. “What would America be like?”

It sounds like the theater of the absurd.

But the play — with an able cast of students, faculty and experienced actors — is a riveting, realistic drama.

Thurmond and the Devil’s Advocate summon a slew of witnesses — his father, J. William; his first wife, Jean; his out-of-wedlock biracial daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams; a soldier who landed with Thurmond behind German lines on D-Day; and Sue Logue, Thurmond’s alleged mistress and the first woman to die in South Carolina’s electric chair. All appear in flashbacks.

So do loyal aide Billy Joe Rutledge — a composite of real-life aides Harry Dent, Duke Short and Warren Abernathy — and Thurmond’s real-life teenage black mistress, Carrie Butler. Other characters are President Harry Truman and former Washington Post writer Sally Quinn. Each testifies and is cross-examined.

Author David Zinman, 74, a part-time professor at Coastal Carolina University, has researched Thurmond’s life in depth. For the most part, what the audience sees and hears is real history. Because Thurmond was a larger-than-life person, the play never has to be preachy or stretch to depict his life’s amazing paths.

“I’ve tried to write a balanced story,” Zinman said.

The characters give voice and humanity to South Carolina’s 20th-century social upheavals.

“Senator, I know you think you helped me. And you did some. But a whole lot more help was needed,” intones a black woman in the play, a composite character named Martha Chesnut.

Later, as Thurmond argues his case to King, he says, “Your honor, I did not create the policy of segregation. I was born into it. ... I evolved. ... I changed with the times.”

Music and 12-foot slides of Thurmond and people in his life give the play the atmosphere of a docudrama.

Zinman said he wrote the play after writing a lengthy article on Thurmond’s 100th birthday for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At the end, he realized he couldn’t answer the question of whether Thurmond’s change from segregationist to racial moderate had been a real change of heart or simply a matter of political survival.

“I wrote the play to answer that question,” Zinman said.

A broader moral question — how responsible are we for our choices? — underlies the play.

“The story is much bigger than Strom’s story,” director Roberts said.

Zinman was a longtime reporter for The Associated Press and Newsday in New York. His journalism background, he said, led him to try to depict Thurmond with understanding, while at the same time baring the injustices of white supremacy.

The play would never have been allowed or performed at a South Carolina public university in the days of segregation. Black and white actors and actresses appearing on the same stage in a play that mentioned interracial Southern sex would have sparked riots.

The play still might spawn controversy.

Roberts said a Sons of Confederate Veterans member — a Thurmond supporter — was offended at an early reading of the play. And an African-American professor who read it disliked it for not being tough enough on segregation, he said.

Actor Tom Conder, 51, who plays Strom’s father and the character of Satan, said the play is balanced. “I didn’t want to get involved if it was Strom-bashing — or if it was something that was pro-Strom. This is something that’s fair.”

So — does Strom go to heaven or hell?

Hint No. 1: Martin Luther King Jr. believed in change, redemption and forgiveness.

Hint No. 2: They’re still tweaking the ending.

In any case, Zinman said, “I want the audience to leave the play discussing it.”

Monk attended a dress rehearsal of “Strom in Limbo” on Monday night.