THEATER REVIEW : Author’s Heavy Hand Puts Bit of a Damper on ‘Tea’

SAN DIEGO â€”  Much like he who must lose his soul before he can find it, many people do not begin to realize how deeply they will miss the traditions of home until they find themselves standing at the prow of a ship, gazing at all they once knew shrinking to a blur on the horizon.

As the land of the immigrants--and consequently that of the homesick--America is full of such tales aching to be told. Many have been heard to the point of cliche; “Tea,� playing at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage through May 8, has not.

In “Tea,� the playwright, Velina Hasu Houston, has tapped into the rich vein of her own mother’s experience as a Japanese war bride to tell the story of five such women who left their native Japan for the United States after marrying American servicemen stationed in their country after World War II.

It is hard to think of a more poignant image to capture the loneliness of these women than the picture Houston paints of a small tea-drinking island adrift in a Kansas ocean of middle-American coffee klatches.

It is also an image of which the play could use more. Houston, who researched this work by interviewing 50 such war brides in Kansas, clearly cares about her subject deeply.

Unfortunately, she does not resist the temptation of telling rather than showing us what we should glean from the story. Each time the women’s conversation begins to relax into a lyricism that makes one hope that the play will at last take flight, Houston crushes her creation with leaden, didactic speeches.

The story deserves better.

Four Japanese women, as different as the men they married--a white, a black, a Latino and a Japanese-American--meet at the home of a fifth woman, a recent suicide, to drink tea.

The ghost of the fifth, Himiko Hamilton, appears as a character who tells the audience that she cannot rest until the women, who never quite fit into their new lives in America, can at least find harmony with each other.

Such a message cries out for subtlety, like a silver fish that should be flitting below the surface of the water to be caught only at a final moment of epiphany.

But even a sterling performance by Gerrielani Miyazaki as Himiko cannot bring the artificiality of the dead woman’s words to life.

The play’s best moments are the vignettes in which the women re-create their courtships, impersonate their husbands, and play their adolescent Amerasian children. Lily Mariye is particularly funny as Teruko, the modest Japanese girl who will only go out with her swaggering, Texas-born suitor if he takes all seven girls from her shop along on their movie dates. And Miyazaki is chilling as her abusive, bigoted husband, particularly when the sheer verbal and physical force of her portrayal of him shoots like a dybbuk through the frailness of her graceful, geisha-like figure.

But rather than flowing musically in and out of the continuing action of the tea ceremony, these segments stop and start clumsily as they hook up, as if with reluctance, to the main story.

The resultant lack of tautness stultifies in a 90-minute show, performed without a break.

The heavy-handed direction of Julianne Boyd exacerbates the melodramatics of the dialogue. In contrast, the strength of the play lies in the visuals--from the simple eloquence of Cliff Faulkner’s set, a red table where the women drink their tea, to Peter Maradudin’s smoky lighting and C.L. Hundley’s simple costumes, which effectively evoke the women’s varying positions in American life.

The best visuals, however, lie in the power packed by these women when they are just looking at each other. No words in the script measure up to the sight of Teruko’s apprehensive, darting eyes playing off the defiant ones of Chizuye (Diana Tanaka), who is determined to be 100% American, and the dangerous ones of Himiko, who survived World War II only to perish in the more relentless war between men and women.

These portraits are at once a tribute to the acting talents of this fine ensemble and to the exemplary way in which Houston has suggested, though not released, her characters from the marble.

“Tea� is the third play in a trilogy Houston wrote that includes “Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken)� and “American Dreams,� plays that deal with her mother’s leaving Japan to marry her half-black, half-American Indian father, and her father’s introducing his Japanese bride to his New York family.

It is also only the fourth play the 30-year-old Houston has written. As such, it may be better viewed as a suggestion of potential rather than as a measure of accomplishment. What she needs the next time around is less matter and more art.