TAGE REVIEW : ‘MUSIC LESSONS’: A FAMILIAR TUNE AT EAST WEST PLAYERS

Wakako Yamauchi’s “The Music Lessons” at the East West Players is drawn from the same well of memory and forgiveness as produced Yamauchi’s first play, the beautiful “And the Soul Shall Dance.” Again we look back 50 years to the Imperial Valley, where a first-generation Japanese farmer could work the land, but not own it.

“And the Soul Shall Dance” showed us a woman broken by the valley. “The Music Lessons” concerns a woman who will not be broken by it (Shizuko Hoshi). She came here a “picture bride”--sent for by a man whom she didn’t know and whom she never grew to love. When he died, leaving her with three children, she became the farmer.

As her sons (Darrell Kunitomi, Timothy Dang) get older, the burden gets lighter. (Her daughter, Susan Haruye Ioka, will be kept dainty and bookish.) But another hand around the place would mean that the boys could go to school. One day a well-mannered fellow from the city shows up at her screen door (Soon-Teck Oh). He offers to work for nothing until the harvest is in.

He surprises her by turning out to be a good worker. And at night he plays his violin in the shed. It is arranged that he will give the daughter music lessons. The mother feels happy sitting in the kitchen after supper, with the music coming from the shed. She realizes that she has felt more like a human being ever since the stranger came.

Then the music from the shed stops, and it comes into her head--not that she hasn’t been aware of it for some time--that her daughter is no longer a little girl. What are they doing in there, her daughter and the stranger?

This is a delicate play, full of things not said and things not clearly seen--at least by the characters. In an earlier version performed a few seasons back at Cal State L.A., the script itself seemed underwritten. There is more for the actors to work with now, but the play still seems more latent than realized at East West. Certainly some of its problems can be located in Mako’s production.

One problem relates to pace. One doesn’t want a brisk tattoo of voices in “The Music Lessons.” We need the silence of the farm, the awkwardness of a shy person who doesn’t know what to say next. But the silences should be as telling as the rests in a musical score. Here they too often read as lapses: either a failure to pick up the last actor’s line, or to mark the rhythm of one’s own line.

The effect is to remind the audience that these are lines, not actual speech. It’s a particular problem for Hoshi, in every other way quite convincing as the mother, slowly changing from a workhorse back into a feeling human being--jealousy of her own daughter being one of those feelings.

Another problem with the production is the signaling of information that an audience should be allowed to infer: what’s known in the acting trade as “indicating.” Dana Lee begins it with his hobbling-on as an old farmer, and Soon-Teck Oh continues it with the stranger’s stunned looks as his guilty past in the city regularly catches up with him. Again, the actor’s personal qualities--sweetness, vulnerability, dignity--make him perfect for the role . . .if his director will point out to him where he’s underlining things without need.

A third problem is a lack of levels in the playing, especially evident in the daughter’s role, which remains underwritten. It’s probably unfair to expect an actress as young as Susan Haruye Ioka to understand a girl so betwixt-and-between as this child. But she should understand that big emotions on the stage can’t come from nowhere. Again, a director’s modulation was called for.

In sum, the actors (including Darrell Kunitomi and Timothy Dang as the boys) are roughly right. But with a script this delicate, roughly right won’t do. Nor does the physical production--Mako’s 1940s-style set, with its cutaway farm house and wrinkled scrim; Rae Creevey’s fitful light plot; Terrence Tam Soon’s too-spanking-clean costumes--make us forget that we’re watching a play in a theater.

“The Music Lessons” may need the poetry of film to make its best appeal to the imagination. If we could see those fields and feel the rhythm of those days, we might be able to live this story instead of noting it from the sidelines. At East West we know what we’re supposed to feel, but the attempt to do so involves us, too, in “indicating.” The play deserves more searching work, and this company is capable of it.

‘THE MUSIC LESSONS’ Wakako Yamauchi’s play, at the East West Players. Director Mako. Light design Rae Creevey. Set design Mako. Costumes Terrence Tam Soon. Producer Keone Young. With Dana Lee, Soon-Teck Oh, Darrell Kunitomi, Susan Haruye, Ioka, Timothy Dang, Shizuko Hoshi, Kevin Newcomb, Janellen Steininger. Plays Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m. Closes May 5. Tickets $8-$10. 4424 Santa Monica Blvd. (660-0366).