As Madea, whose melon-sized breasts flop energetically over her waist, Perry ladles out wit and indignation as poten- tially scathing as the grits on her stove. "A man likes a challenge," goes a typical Madea pronouncement. "If you're throwing it at him, sometimes he don't want to catch it."

Addressing a female usurper in her granddaughter's home, she declares: "You da ho. You ain't got no power."

They are the zingers that, out of costume, Perry, 38, is loath to speak.

"I hate all the makeup and the wigs that come with the character," he said last week at his studio office in Atlan- ta, "but the freedom to be able to say whatever I want, that's pretty cool."

And what Perry wants to say, increas- ingly, has an unambiguously spiritual message. "I have this unbelievable pull to have people see these movies and be healed. So many people are in need of healing."

His latest message comes through Tyler Perry's "The Marriage Counselor," which will be performed at Hampton Coliseum on Saturday and Sunday.

In the decade since he began his career, Perry's stage plays, DVDs, his TBS sitcom "House of Payne," his online talk show and a book of Madea's commen- taries have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, partly by pushing a message of sin and redemption.

The faithful are rewarded and the wicked come to ruin. Beneath its bawdy humor, his work is candidly moralizing and espouses the kind of values he learned in the Baptist church he grew up in and still attends.

He is using his work as a "platform to do a kind of user-friendly and acces- sible black Christian ministry," said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University. "He realized that there is a segment of the black community that would define itself as churchgoing and that simply has no interest in what Hollywood, the stage and, to a certain extent, the music industry was offering."

In "The Marriage Counselor," Roger Jackson, an accountant, and his wife, Judith, a marriage counselor, struggle to find ways to keep work, other family members and fate from tearing up their marriage.

Despite their piety, the works have drawn fire from Christian conserva- tives.

"With Tyler Perry, you get a mixed bag," said Bob Waliszewski, a media specialist with Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian group. "You get some of the most positive messages of the screen today, contrasted with characters unsure how to operate, especially on sexual issues."

The fighting words seem not to rattle Perry. Seated behind a desk, in an office that is all bark-colored leather and wood, he maintains an intimidating, rocklike calm.

"What I'm clear about," Perry said evenly, "is I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing" - that is, offering alter- natives to Hollywood obsessions with sex and gore.

Like his characters and his audience, Perry is no stranger to struggle and poverty. The filmmaker, who grew up in a lower-middle-class house- hold in New Orleans, led an itinerant life in his youth, acting in gospel- themed plays on what is known as the "chitlin' circuit," and sleeping on park benches when he could not pay the rent.

To some degree, Perry's flawed protagonists reflect reality, said Bishop Paul S. Morton, senior pastor of the Greater St. Stephen Ministry in New Orleans and Atlanta, the Baptist church in which Perry grew up and still attends. "Tyler talks about people who make mis- takes, and some people in his audience may recognize themselves."

And Perry dreams of creating a TV network with cartoons, news broadcasts, comedy shows and dramatic series that "will reinforce positive, good messages."

And beyond all that?

"Someday," he said, "I'd like to own my own island."