STAGE : Two Blistering Commentaries on Brutalization

Onto the dimly lit stage--black floor, black walls--ambles a tall young woman: dark, penetrating eyes, sharply limned features, jet-black hair. In one hand she carries bottled water, in the other a paperback book. The title--hard to decipher--is Susan Brownmiller’s “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.”

She stops. Her gaze wanders over the audience, assessing it as it might the ripeness of a melon. Then she moves on, settling on a cot at the opposite side of the stage.

“Phan Thi Mao was a young girl who had a gold tooth,” she starts, “and it was too bad because when the soldiers came to her village they noticed it and singled her out.”

With this line, performer Jude Narita is off and running, recounting a chilling tale of violence and rape in a still, unemotional voice.

A few minutes later, having changed behind a transparent screen, she becomes a teen-ager in shades and taut black miniskirt, one hand wielding a black hair brush, hips impudently jerking up and down under the fringed black leather jacket as she stands, facing the audience, first on one foot, then the other. “So? . . . What . . . ?”

The tone is all attitude. She’s chewing gum with mandibular acrobatics that threaten at any moment to send the gum flying like a guided missile. “I got into a couple of fights,” she says. The look is faintly sardonic. “Does that mean I’m a troublemaker . . . ?”

Narita’s one-woman show, “Coming Into Passion: Song for a Sansei,” is the best kind of troublemaker. It has been playing for 11 months at the tiny Fountain Theater in Hollywood, even if this writer only recently caught up with it. Aside from the rape of Phan Thi Mao and the jump-cut to that defiant Sansei teen-ager--third-generation Japanese-American--who can’t relate to Japan (“It has nothing to do with me . . . “), it illustrates more violations through four other penetrating sketches.

Meet the Vietnamese prostitute who tells you with pride that she has “a good job,” because she works in a bar instead of a cage or the street--or the Filipina mail-order bride, desperate to please, as she undergoes the humiliations of a videotaped interview. “Whatever my perfect husband wants. . . .”

Listen to the harrowing fable of Kimiko, the “boy” who fell from the sky, inspired by “Children of Hiroshima,” a collection of letters written by youngsters who survived the atomic blast. And watch, in perhaps the most masterful portrait of all, the transformation of a sensitive young Sansei who, at great cultural cost, finds the strength to repudiate the doctrines of “niceness” and “invisibility” her mother had so painstakingly taught her. “All my life I have disappeared into other people,” she says as she finally stands up for herself, discovering at last that she is the golden promise “of the future that my parents dreamed of.”

These vignettes--distinct and hard and etched in acid--constitute a blistering commentary on the brutalization of our world, with particular emphasis on the Asian and/or Amerasian female in it, yet ending on that shimmeringly self-assertive note.

A few miles south at the San Diego Old Globe, a play by Velina Hasu Houston with the deceptively simple title “Tea” does something similar by vastly different means.

It brings together four Japanese-American war brides two decades after they were first jettisoned in Junction City, Kan., “a pimple on an Army base called Ft. Riley.”

Japanese-American brides in redneck middle America? “Welcome to the land of great, wide plains and narrow minds.”

First staged at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club last October, “Tea” has received fascinating reviews, ranging up to unabashed raves, because Houston, speaking chiefly through the experience of her mother (a war bride married to a black American), is not only depicting the isolation and intolerance these women experienced. She zeroes in on the bigot and the brutalizer in us all.

Her women, married to career Army men, are not friends. They are acquaintances with frequently uncharitable opinions of one another. They meet for ceremonial tea over the suicide of a fifth war bride, Himiko. It’s a matter of form, not fondness.

They avoided Himiko when she was alive. Himiko was always a little crazy. She killed her husband, “shot him through the heart (she) never knew he had,” two years before turning the gun on herself--a serious embarrassment coming from a culture where it is an eminent matter of self-respect to “carry everything inside.”

Himiko’s ghost is present at this ceremony, hovering around the other four, correcting their recollections, commenting on their vision of her life and their own, looking back on the events that took her so tragically from point A to point B. But there’s no sentimentality. Tempers flare. Attitudes are challenged. The living and dead reveal their smugness as much as the injuries sustained when a culture had to be surrendered and so little substituted for it in return.

Houston chose the women she depicts with clinical calculation. One is married to a black American (like her mother), one to a Latino, one to a Japanese-American (who hates Japanese food) and one to a Caucasian Texan. Himiko’s husband was the ultimate redneck--a drunkard who beat her up. When she asked why he’d married her, he said he “wanted a good maid for free.”

Expiation of sorts does finally take place in “Tea”--another note of optimism--but Houston’s brides air out a lot of laundry in the course of this long afternoon, even if at the end they are less angry and closer to one another. Yet the bottom line, in a play written with a very deft poetic touch, is that none of these women has been able to shake her displacement--the trauma of coming from one society to another and ultimately belonging to neither.

Like plants, people are damaged by uprooting. Scars form that never quite disappear, no matter how willing the people may be to adapt. “These women,” Houston writes in the Old Globe program, “remain forever trapped between cultures and countries. . . . They no longer feel at home in Japan and they don’t truly feel at home in America. They are . . . in cultural limbo.”

Both “Tea” and “Coming Into Passion” address a fundamental American dilemma that, ironically, does not discriminate. America is a land of immigrants and a lot of its societal dislocations can be traced to a loss of cultural identity and the prejudice to which these immigrants are too frequently exposed.

We are all--black, yellow, brown, Italian, Irish or Indian--equal under that law, but the long arm of denial and bigotry extends deep into our national psyche. The fabled melting pot doesn’t always do its job. It doesn’t always thoroughly melt (and meld) its ingredients or, conversely, properly respect their individual autonomy.

Houston and Narita have taken their consciousness as women and as Japanese-Americans, filtered them through the lessons of history and the experience of parents and others, and brilliantly illuminated this much broader sociopolitical canvas. Singer Miriam Makeba was quoted recently as saying that “No pain matches the pain of not having a country.” The country’s there; it’s finding one’s place in it that can be hard.

With at least part of “Coming Into Passion,” Narita has forged her awareness into a brazen commentary on the dehumanizing of culture through the brutalizing of women (and children). In “Tea,” Houston demonstrates that such brutality can sometimes be more artfully concealed but, in the long run, just as devastating.

Narita’s clutching of Brownmiller’s book at the beginning of her show is not an idle gesture. She acknowledges it influenced her profoundly when she was researching her piece. “My preconceptions about different nationalities found that all people had brutalized someone or other by hurting the women and children of the other race or even of their own,” she said. “If you’re sort of normal, you don’t tap into these things. But there’s a terrible hunger for violence out there. . . . “

Loss of cultural identity is violence to the self. And its damage is permanent. Himiko’s experience in “Tea” is an outwardly radical expression of the more inward cultural beating experienced by each of the other characters in the piece--applying also, by extension, to the more particularized portraits in Narita’s “Coming Into Passion.”

“America is full of people who don’t belong there,” said another woman in another play. And full of violence. And full of people fighting back. Most productively through art.