STAGE REVIEW : ‘Stew Rice’: Nostalgia and Reality

The title of Edward Sakamoto’s “Stew Rice” is as homey and nostalgic as his play--a valentine to knockabout youth and growing up in Hawaii. It refers to a familiar dish that his three protagonists remember fondly from their childhood. In Act I we see these guys--lumpy Zippy Ching (Benjamin Lum), quiet Russell Shima (Keone Young) and smart Ben Lee (Marcus Mukai)--who have been buddies since the third grade, giddy with the excitement of high school graduation and the beginning of Real Life. In Act II, we see what’s happened to all three. Simple? At least, in part.

What distinguishes the play most is its locale. These are young Hawaiians for whom moving to the Mainland is as big a deal as it would be for an Italian or an Irishman to immigrate to the United States (and will have as profound an influence). It is also about something the Italian and the Irish won’t necessarily think about: whether to become “haolefied” or assimilated into the “white” culture, and to what extent.

When we first meet good-natured Zippy, subdued Russ and handsome Ben (the class valedictorian and clearly the one among them most likely to succeed), they’re making life decisions. Ben is off to Harvard medical school and Russ is wavering between going to UCLA or Antioch (where his favorite heartthrob/teacher, Miss Fletcher, also went). For Zippy, the question never arises: He’s going to UH (the University of Hawaii). It’s a matter of economics as much as choice.

The boys are exhilarated. They go crabbing at a favorite spot on the beach. They meet girls: sexy Ruby (Dian Kobayashi), prudish Donna (Karen Murayama) and lively Sharon (Nancy Omi). They’re bashful. They go to a dance. They stumble, they gawk, but life is ineluctably sweet, sweeter than it will ever be again.

Act II is 20 years later. A high school reunion brings Russ and Ben back to Hawaii. Ben’s a wealthy stock analyst (he gave up medicine after Vietnam). He’s also moody, restless and divorced--not the happiest guy on the block if still, in material terms, the most successful.

Russ, our narrator (and the playwright’s alter ego), has remained much the same, only older, unmarried, insular, the observer. He’s now a more-or-less-contented movie critic in Los Angeles. Only the happy-go-lucky Zippy is much his former ebullient self. He has married Sharon. They have two boys and have settled into a terminally uneventful middle-class life. Is that so bad? Is it so good? And who’s to say?

There are illustrative encounters--between Ben and Ruby (also a divorcee), who were always drawn to each other and still are; between Russ and Donna (unmarried and still prudish), who never much liked each other and still don’t. But the heart of the play lies in a discussion among the three male friends about their lives and what they’ve done with them as they meet, for one last time, at the old crabbing spot. The two haolefied mainlanders rationalize their decision to leave when they did and force Zippy to defend his to remain. He, at least, as he points out, has retained his identity. Can the others say as much?

In fact, they can’t. They are neither Hawaiians any more, nor mainlanders. Not fish, not fowl. The transition for them has been as traumatic as for any other transplanted creature. Somebody once said that America is full of people who don’t belong there. In every way, that’s what Sakamoto’s play is also--and perhaps most centrally--about.

It’s a complex subject treated here with less complexity and perhaps more affection than is good for it. The crucial scene at the end, when the crabs fail to show up in the nets (a bit of facile symbolism), is too obvious a discussion, too neatly ordered and dissected. Sakamoto has an easy way with banter, the joshing and intimacy of old chums talking to each other in the evocative colloquialisms of pidgin, but when he needs to get down to serious business and deal with some nitty-gritty, he stops short. He doesn’t reveal enough of what we really want to know: Who these boys/men really are, what they yearn for. It doesn’t invalidate the play, but it makes it less than it could be.

The actors are uniformly strong, their characters well differentiated, and Dana Lee’s direction has a pleasantly jocular, languid end-of-summer feel to it. Yuki Nakamura has created a functionally attractive uniset, aptly lit by Rae Creevey.

Performances at East West Players, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., run Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until Jan. 24. Tickets: $10-$12; (213) 660-0366.