STAGE REVIEW : ‘MEMENTO’S’ MASK OF VAGUENESS

Many plays have used masks to tell their story, but there haven’t been many where a mask figures into the action. In Wakako Yamauchi’s “The Memento” at the East West Players, an ancient Noh mask almost becomes a character.

The mask represents a ruinously jealous woman. It is given by a man’s widow (Dian Kobayashi) to another woman (Shizuko Hoshi) as a “memento” of her late husband. It is not an innocent gift. Both women were in love with this man, before and after the marriage.

There is magic as well as a rebuke in the mask. When the second woman puts it on, she sees her past life--and, beyond that, another life, when she was a geisha struggling with the same friend (Kobayashi again) for the love of a young student (Chris Tashima).

There is, in fact, a young man in the woman’s life (Merv Maruyama). They are just friends, but the potential for an affair is there. Will it end as disastrously as the geisha’s affair with the student?

Like a mask, “The Memento” is pregnant with meaning, but keeps its secrets. The viewer has to decide what it means. Is the woman being warned by the mask not to repeat the past or is she being told that she is doomed to repeat it?

It’s right that the question should be left with the audience. Elsewhere, however, the viewer doesn’t know enough about Yamauchi’s characters to feel properly awed by the fable they seem to be enacting.

The woman who puts on the mask is virtually undefined except when she puts it on. Going back in time with her, we don’t see enough of her affair with the dead husband to tie it to the geisha’s treatment of the student. As for the widow, we can’t tell if she knows about the power of the mask, and we wonder why she fades from the story.

The play needs deeper thought and more incisive dialogue, as when the two women meet after 25 years, glad to see each other (they were best friends once) but suspicious about what the other may have up her sleeve.

Their meeting seems perfunctory at East West, partly because Mako as director hasn’t got very responsive performances out of either actress (they’re much more alive in the geisha sequences) but also because the scene is underwritten. It’s not a question of adding more words, but of finding more revealing ones.

In general, the play suffers from vagueness, which isn’t the same thing as mystery. Maruyama as the young writer across the street, for instance, might be playing Blinky the best friend in some 1940s comedy. An ironic contrast to Tashima’s young samurai style in the geisha sequence may be intended, but one can’t say for sure.

Presumably the play wants to float above such questions, but even a fantasy has to nail certain things down. Gonga Taa’s setting (lighting by Rae Creevey) is in contrast a little too nailed down: Despite the stage directions, the play’s real setting is a woman’s mind, not her apartment. “The Memento” does evoke the magic of the mask--the false face that tells the truth--but it needs a firmer shape.

‘THE MEMENTO’ Wakako Yamauchi’s play, at the East West Players. Director Mako. Set design Gong Taa. Lighting Rae Creevey. Sound and original music Peter Boyd. Producer Keone Young. With Shizuko Hoshi, Merv Maruyama, Dian Kobayashi, Mimosa Iwamatsu and Chris Tashima. Plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and at 7:30 Sundays, with special matinees at 2 on Feb. 23 and March 2. Closes March 23. Tickets $8-$12.50. 4424 Santa Monica Blvd. (213) 660-0366.