EAST WEST ‘GAMBLING DEN’

Distance can be traversed when space is the barrier; when the barrier is time, it’s considerably more difficult. That’s why the East West Players, which is principally a Japanese-American theater company (though other Asian nationalities have been represented there), has spent the best part of its near-20-year existence puzzling the generation gap between the 1232302949generation of the Nisei (the second generation, which was born here) and their children, the assimilated Sansei--all of whom have had painful difficulty communicating with each other.

Each generation views the other across an extraordinary gulf, and the East West Players has tried to do its best to create a theatrical bridge. Its latest effort is Akemi Kikumura’s “The Gambling Den,” which opens Wednesday. Kikumura was a former actress with East West before earni1852252257theatricalization of her book about her mother (researched in Japan) called “Through Harsh Winters.”

“My parents came to America in 1923, the year before the Japanese immigration quota law was passed,” Kikumura said. “I was born after the war. My mother had 13 children. I felt I had no history. I went back to Japan to try to rediscover the past by studying her life.

“ ‘The Gambling Den’ is set in Fowler, which is near Fresno. Gambling dens were very popular before the war. It was the only place bachelors could go in their spare time, and many people went hoping to make a killing. There wasn’t much money around at the time. My father was a gambler. The story isn’t specifically about my family, but it does bring up the question that applies to everyone: How do you maintain love in the face of hardship and disillusion?”

Mako, who directs, also plays the central role of the father, and has his real-life family (wife Shizuko Hoshi and daughters Mimosa and Sala Iwamatsu) playing Kikumura’s stage family as well.

Stephen Sondheim’s “Anyone Can Whistle” was a flop when it opened on Broadway in 1964. It was badly cast, a newspaper strike was on at the time of its debut, and if Sondheim requires close listening in 1986, he was positively esoteric by Broadway standards of that time.

Time doesn’t only tell, it queries. Sondheim is unquestionably a great American theatrical composer-lyricist, and “Anyone Can Whistle” is up for a new look at the Dupree Studio Theater starting Saturday.

Thirty-year-old Yale-educated Frank Basile is musical director. (He’s also a harpsichordist specializing in Baroque music.)

“Two things at least characterize Sondheim’s music,” Basile said. “For one thing, he hates to do anything the easy way. For another, all of his musicals operate out of a central idea or metaphor. This one deals with parody. It echoes Vegas, the soubrette and Tchaikovsky, among other things. He likes to go for the sound. He doesn’t write songs just for the sake of songs, and that’s why none of his work hits the pop charts. He writes everything for a specific theatrical effort.”

That tendency, which other contemporary composers have tended to follow, is one of the things that has painted the musical theater into a corner, aesthetically speaking, according to Basile (the forbidding economics is something else altogether).

“Kern and Gershwin wrote songs that could be separated from a specific musical and played as pop songs on their own,” Basile said. “I don’t think modern composers have thought to bridge that dichotomy. Most modern songs in the theater can’t be extrapolated out of their situation. That’s why, musically speaking, the theater is becoming more and more isolated and specialized.”

Asked if he thought the theater might borrow the energies of rock and pop, as Des McAnuff has tried to do at the La Jolla Playhouse, Basile said: “It’s true that there’s an awful lot of possibility and invention in rock, but I think it boils down to a question of rhythm. I’m not sure that rock can sustain itself in a theatrical setting. It’s a different musical world.”