Playwright Draws on Experience of Growing Up in an Interracial Household

From a very early age, Velina Hasu Houston knew she was different.

“We were an immigrant community,” said the playwright (the offspring of a half African-American, half American Indian soldier and a Japanese mother), who was raised on an Army base in Junction City, Kan. “The Euro-American majority either didn’t like us or was uncomfortable with us; we were even ostracized by the traditional minority groups: African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans. So we became sort of the low men on the racial totem pole.”

Houston, 33, tells the story of four of these military wives in “Tea,” opening this weekend at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in West Los Angeles. “These were Japanese women who’d come from various parts of Japan, from various class backgrounds, who’d married American servicemen at the end of World War II,” she said. “Because of Army resettlement policies for active-duty personnel who were married to Oriental women, they ended up in Kansas.”

Set in 1968, Houston’s story is unabashedly personal: One of the characters is based on her mother.

“As I came into my teens, I began to sit down and have tea with my mother and her friends,” she said. “They’d get together in the late afternoon, drink tea and talk about their lives. The older I became, the more I understood the strength they’d had to muster to be able to survive--both as native Japanese and members of interracial couples--and began recording some of the things they’d discuss.”

At the time, Houston (whose interview circle eventually grew to include 50 women) was herself involved in an interracial relationship. “I was also beginning to get involved in various politics. Most of all, though, I was moved by the nature of their experiences. I also realized that these women’s voices had never been heard in American literature or dramatic literature.”

“Tea,” which premiered in 1985 in a Rockefeller workshop production at San Francisco’s Asian American Theater Company, went on to a dozen professional stagings, including the Manhattan Theater Club, Olympia Dukakis’ Whole Theatre in Montclair, N.J., and the Old Globe in San Diego. Julianne Boyd directed these productions, and is remounting the one here with her cast from the 1988 Old Globe staging. Houston proudly describes their alliance as “one of the few woman director-woman writer teams in the country.”

The Odyssey run represents a breakthrough of sorts for Houston: Although she has lived in Los Angeles for a decade, she has seen little of her work done here.

“It hasn’t been easy,” she said. “I have this ‘peculiar’ writing voice in the sense that it’s very lyrical, poetic. Critics of my work have said, ‘That’s not how people talk.’ ” Odyssey artistic director Ron Sossi concurs: “There is an edge to her writing, a kind of lyricism. I also liked the idea of the play--people pulled out of a big, ancient culture like Japan and placed in the middle of rural America. It’s kind of an extreme portrait of the kind of cross-cultural uprooting that goes on in our world now, especially in L.A.”

Although she often uses her own life as a basis for her work, Houston says she’s not restricted by it.

“Whatever the subject, I have to have a passion for it,” she said. “But as I write more and more, I’m beginning to explore things outside my family experience.” An example is her newest play, “Necessities,” set to open at the Old Globe in July. “It’s about illegal adoption,” Houston said, “a woman who sets out to buy a baby. But it’s also about a woman exploring her humanity and the meaning of trust in a long-term relationship. She also discovers a lot about herself politically and personally.”

The political thread is a constant: “I guess most of my plays are political in a personal sense; they have a social consciousness about them that hopefully allows people to understand each other better and lead to some sense of enlightenment. Usually the plays explore elements of culture, often my own. I think an exploration of my culture is an exploration of everyone’s culture, because I’m very racially and culturally mixed.”

It has led her to speak out often on behalf of what she considers a neglected minority, the Amerasian.

“First of all, we’re very new to this country--the creation of American military presence in Asian countries,” she said. “The media understanding of the Amerasian experience is very limited. Also, whenever the Amerasian is handled dramatically, we’re usually pictured as this poor waif whose mother commits suicide, and the great white father must rescue us and take us to America-- a la ‘Miss Saigon.’ ”

The writer sighed. “I’m tired of that. I’m also tired of the multiracial portrayal in general. In ‘Showboat,’ Julie is ostracized by both communities, damned because of her multiracial heritage. Of course, historically, there’s a lot of truth to that. Society loves categories, whether it’s humans or cars or whatever. They want a category that makes everything--excuse the expression--black or white. Gray is very difficult to accept.”

Houston’s activism led to her 1981 co-founding of the Amerasian League--plus a busy schedule of speaking engagements at theaters, universities and civic conferences.

“It’s exhausting,” she said. “It really began as a matter of accident, but the truth is I’m a political activist; it’s part of the nature of my birth and the fact that I was given a voice. I have to use it. Whenever I’d hear something about Amerasians, it was always some scholar talking about us poor Amerasian folk and how psychologically disturbed we were, being half-American and half-Asian.”

Because of her exotic looks, Houston often finds her ethnic heritage a matter of public curiosity. “People always think I’m something else,” she said. “I get everything from Micronesian to Balinese to Puerto Rican to West Indian to Somalian; they can never quite put their finger on it. My feeling is, I just want to be who I am. If being who I am takes some explanation because it’s something new, then I’m bound and determined to explain it.”

Doesn’t it get tiring?

“It does. But the need to solidify and create consciousness about who we are goes on. It’s like being Jewish or African-American: You could say, ‘All right, enough. Let’s get on with it.’ But the reality is, in the getting on with it, experiences come up that need to be challenged, addressed. It’s not like I go around with a sign saying, ‘I’m Amerasian and let’s have a political discussion about it.’ I just go about my life--writing, teaching, being a mother--then I walk into a bank, and somebody says something.”

Houston, who was recently offered a permanent teaching position at USC, began writing at age 6 when her mother encouraged her to write haiku poetry.

“I think it was a relaxation technique,” she said, laughing. At 13, with the encouragement of a teacher, she wrote her first play--filling up on O’Neill, Ibsen and Chekhov for inspiration--and discovered a passion for play writing. At Kansas State University, Houston minored in philosophy (“which made me think”), double-majoring in journalism (“which made me go out and meet people”) and theater, where she built sets, directed and acted. “It helped me to see everyone’s perspective,” she said.

At UCLA graduate school, Houston’s senior thesis, “Asa Ga Kimashita” (about her paternal grandfather) won the David Library Playwriting Award for American Freedom--and the Lorraine Hansberry Award for best play about the black American experience. Not surprisingly, some black students were not amused. “People have to think beyond this very closed, exclusive community,” Houston said. “The reality is that the African-American experience extends to Japan because of World War II.”

The playwright’s strong ties to Asian culture continue with her 4-year-old son, Kiyoshi.

“My mother raised me knee-deep in Japanese culture; I’m doing the same with him because it’s what I know best,” she said. “Last week the plumber came, and I said, ‘You’ll have to remove your shoes.’ He flipped open his transmitter and said, ‘Mike, we’ve got another one of them Hindus here in Santa Monica.’ ” Houston grinned. “Kiyoshi was following him around saying, ‘You don’t understand--you can’t wear your shoes in the house. It brings in the demons and dirt from the street.’ ”

“Tea” plays Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. in West Los Angeles, through March 10. Tickets are $17.50 to $21.50. (213) 477-2055.