STAGE REVIEW : ‘RASHOMON’ WITHOUT ITS EMOTION

Because there is such a powerful central idea in “Rashomon,” it’s a play that surfaces with regularity.

San Diego’s Old Globe did a striking production of it two seasons back. The 1958 Akira Kurosawa film of the same title remains a perennial classic. Now the East West Players celebrate their 20th anniversary with a restaging of the very show that launched their enduring theater two decades ago.

This anniversary production is outwardly burnished: It has a masterful set by Gong Taa, appropriate mood lighting by Rae Creevey, excellent costumes by Rodney Kageyama. Inwardly, it’s another story. Despite the distinguished trappings, director Shizuko Hoshi appears to have paid only ceremonial tribute to “Rashomon’s” incisive human equations.

Fay and Michael Kanin’s play, so vividly adapted for the stage from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s writings, equates truth with a three-way mirror. The vision you get depends on the point of view.

A husband, his wife and the bandit who chances on them in the woods each have a different version of what happened when they met. Who is one to believe? The facts are that the wife was raped and her husband killed, but how and why are a matter of very personal interpretation.

A court, having to decide who’s to be punished and for what crime, finds that out soon enough. We, in the audience, relive the events as a priest, a woodcutter and a wig maker rehash them a day later, in the shelter of Rashomon gate during a blinding rainstorm.

Few plays afford such opportunities to probe man’s infinite capacity for bending the truth to emblazon his ego. Given the possibilities--the unfolding of version after remarkable version of the same story--it is disappointing that Hoshi polished only the surfaces of this prism without exposing it to better light. The result is something “Rashomon” should not be: predictably unpredictable.

Performances are more or less skin-deep, from Keone Young, who gives us the liveliest (and fullest) portrait as the rambunctious bandit, to Benjamin Lum (priest), Darrell Kunitomi (woodcutter) and Timothy Dang (wig maker), who all are younger than the characters they play and do not escape the variety of traps that attend youth playing age.

June Kim gives us a particularly shrewish wife, which adds an unexpected dimension to that role (notably, humor), though beyond the shrillness we still don’t have much insight into the woman. As her samurai husband, Francois Chau cuts a lordly figure, but lacks the smoldering fire of this most humiliated of men.

Sala Iwamatsu and Doreen Remo are assets as the medium and the mother, respectively. And Richard Lee Sung is properly furious as the deputy who turns in the bandit. Fight choreography by Kiyoshi Yamasaki is a little pat, but redeems itself in the final cowardly encounter between the men--plenty of comedy here, of the right kind and degree.

Sound design (Yuki Nakamura) provides the only evidence of rain (overwhelming at times), while the baby’s cries at play’s end come over the loudspeaker instead of the bundle of blankets passed, rather too carelessly, from the priest to the woodcutter.

Something of this sort of cursory attention to detail afflicts the production at its core. For all of its visual elegance--and elegant it is--we miss true character excavation. In the end, we have witnessed motions more often than emotions.

Performances at 4424 Santa Monica Blvd. run Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays 7:30 p.m. until June 22, (213) 660-0366.