STAGE REVIEW : ‘Coming Into Passion’ at Theatre 6111

Jude Narita’s gallery of Asian and Asian-American women, “Coming Into Passion, Song for a Sansei,” has returned to town at Theatre 6111, essentially unchanged from its earlier, award-winning incarnations at the Powerhouse and Fountain Theatres.

In a series of brief monologues, Narita plays a cheerful Vietnamese prostitute, a desperate Filipina mail-order bride, a Nisei (second-generation Japanese-American) woman who is learning to assert herself, and a rowdy Sansei (third-generation Japanese-American) teen-ager. She also performs “Little Boy,” a fairy tale about Hiroshima.

There isn’t a clinker in the bunch. Narita’s writing begins to paint remarkably rounded portraits with a few simple strokes, and her performing completes the picture. She goes to the heart of the conflicts brewing within these women--and in so doing she also works on a larger canvas, covering what happens when Asian and American cultures collide.

The only obvious updating in the show is a radio news bulletin about the Stockton schoolyard shootings of Asian children, carefully timed to precede Narita’s Hiroshima piece. We’re also able now, as we weren’t before, to compare Narita’s Sansei sketch to “Sansei,” the full-length musical extravaganza that played the Mark Taper Forum last spring. Narita’s piece is much funnier and more pointed.

Narita’s prologue and epilogue aren’t as successful as the rest of the piece. Her final speech about the value of the heart, offered during her curtain call, is particularly prosaic, in comparison with what has gone before, and utterly superfluous. She’s much better at creating characters who express her feelings than she is at stating those feelings directly.

At 6111 W. Olympic Blvd., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Tickets: $15; (213) 466-1767.