THE SOUL AND THE PLAYWRIGHT SHALL DANCE

Nine years ago, writer Wakako Yamauchi was asked by Mako, artistic director of East West Players, if she would expand her short story, “And the Soul Shall Dance,” into a play for the company. Of course she would. The problem was, she’d never written a play before.

“So I sent my daughter (Joy, an editor for the Tozai Times of Los Angeles) to the Gardena Library for a book on how to write plays,” she recalled during a recent visit to Westwood. Among the pearls of playwriting wisdom she picked up: “I learned that, for stage directions, you start from the middle of the page and go this way (right).”

Yamauchi--an uncommonly youthful 61--laughed easily. Her playwriting efforts may have come along late in life, but the results have been rewarding. With a handful of Rockefeller grants and a 1978 nomination by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle (for outstanding new play, “Soul Shall Dance”), Yamauchi’s latest work, “The Memento,” kicks off the 20th-anniversary season Wednesday at East West.

“It is not a happy play,” she warned. “It’s moody, deals with love, passion, jealousy.”

Originally inspired by a “face box” (an eerie souvenir she acquired in Hawaii several years ago), “Memento” is the story of “two women, who as girls battled over the same man. Now, 30 years later, the one who got the man returns--as a widow--to offer the memento to her old girlfriend. And as she puts it on, a story unfolds.

“It could be a psychodrama--in her mind--or it could be, if you believe in such things, a curse,” the playwright continued vaguely. “So the rest of the play could be fantasies or actualities. The women continue in the action, as themselves and as other people.

“This was a story first,” Yamauchi stressed. In fact, all of her plays began life as short stories. It’s a form she often returns to: “When I get stuck in a play, I go back and write a short story, so I can see the motion, the movement--the thrust of it. If you can just write it simply as a short story, it’s much easier to develop. And, you know, a short story is most like a play (in terms of writing styles) in that it’s clean and taut and there’s no dawdling.

“Of course, there are differences. In a play, you have to show with dialogue how a person feels; in a story you can just say ‘He was angry.’ In a play, the anger would have to be coming out of his mouth, expressed in words and action.”

Although her theatrical detour is relatively recent, Yamauchi has been writing steadily for several decades, publishing her short stories in the English-language section of Rafu Shimpo, a local Japanese newspaper.

“Ethnic stories seldom get published in white magazines, in the mainstream,” she explained with little rancor. “There are many, many writers of the ‘30s, Japanese-Americans or Asian-Americans--very fine writers who died in obscurity. I was one of them” (in terms of non-recognition).

But her luck changed when she submitted “Soul Shall Dance” for inclusion in an anthology (initiated by a group who felt “there was nothing to teach from the Japanese-American literature”). Under Mako’s encouragement, “Soul” was mounted at East West and, later that year, produced by Hollywood Television Theatre for national airing on PBS.

The cultural basis in her work, she pointed out, is merely a by-product of her original intent: “I wanted to be honest , write about what I knew.” And since she lived through the internment camps of World War II (she was in her late teens when her family was relocated and incarcerated in Arizona), she often returns--in her work--to that experience.

“Detention camps, evacuation centers,” she said wearily, “they’re all euphemisms. They were concentration camps. Not gas chambers or anything like that, but there were guards there, and their guns were pointing in, not out. They said, ‘We’re here to guard you, keep people out’--but they weren’t. . . . Every story that you write about Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans) has to include that, because it changed all of our lives--just as the Civil War was the turning point for blacks.”

Yamauchi does not consider her attention to the subject either morbid or limiting.

“Sure, it’s painful to remember,” she nodded. “I think you can distance yourself from it (in life), but the work has to include it. It’s part of what made me what I am, what makes me think the way I do.” She acknowledges that her concerns are probably more personal than civic-minded: “Maybe it’s just for myself that I do this. I want to talk about my mother, my father, my sisters and brothers. They don’t always know they’re in my plays, but they are.”