A Play Comes Home--to Its Author

When New York City’s Pan Asian Repertory Theatre decided to take Wakako Yamauchi’s “And the Soul Shall Dance” on a California tour, the playwright had no idea what the itinerary would be.

But when she learned that one stop would be the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Yamauchi--a Japanese-American who has lived in a spacious Gardena home for 26 years--said it came as “a nice surprise” that the first play she has ever written is going to be staged so close to home.

“It felt great to know that a play you wrote so many years ago is still alive,” said Yamauchi, who based her 1977 drama on childhood memories of the hardships faced by immigrant Japanese farmers during the Depression of the 1930s.

Indeed, the play--which will be staged at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday at the Norris Theatre for the Performing Arts--has remained alive and vital since Yamauchi wrote it for the East West Players, a Los Angeles group that pioneered Asian-American theater in the United States.

The original production won three Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Awards. The work later was produced for television by the Public Broadcasting Service. “Soul” has been staged by several Asian-American theater groups, and the Pan Asian group first did it in 1979. It was last seen in Los Angeles in 1985 at Cal State Los Angeles.

Since her theatrical bow, Yamauchi has won Rockefeller Foundation grants and has had four other plays produced by East West. The latest was based on the turbulent life of Madame Mao Tse Tung.

East West’s literary manager and dramaturge, Dick Dotterer, said Yamauchi is “probably the longest-practicing Asian-American female playwright. . . . Her writing has very good heart (and) deeply felt characters, both for her and the audience.”

Yamauchi, 66, set out to be an artist, not a writer. But in the late 1940s, she began writing short stories about her childhood in the Imperial Valley and the dehumanizing experiences of life in a World War II Japanese relocation camp, where she was sent with her family as a teen-ager. “I just wanted to record the feelings I had and the life I and my parents led,” she said.

One of these stories was “And the Soul Shall Dance,” which years later became a play at the urging of Mako, then the artistic director of East West. “I told him I was not (a playwright), but he told me he didn’t care how I wrote it or if it was a success or failure,” she recalled. “He wanted me to transform it in my own way and carry the mood of the story. That gave me a great deal of confidence. I rewrote it six times.”

An accident also gave her added motivation. She broke her leg and had no choice but to lie in bed and write.

The play came out of Yamauchi’s rural childhood, which she said was a life of hard work on isolated farms. The Japanese immigrants were legally prevented from owning land, so they harvested crops from farm to farm as tenants.

“It was not an easy life, but we knew no better,” she said, calling her play--which focuses on two families--”a coming of age play.” One family is bound closer together by the harshness and despair of life, but the other is destroyed.

Yamauchi calls the play--which has been dubbed a “Japanese Grapes of Wrath”--a story of loneliness, nostalgia for Japan and of people “using all of their resources toward keeping body and spirit alive in a hostile land.”

Kati Kuroda, who directed the play for the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, calls it “a wonderful play for six actors in that the characters are very rich. . . . These characters all have dreams and aspirations in the new country.”

Yamauchi said she tries to write stories of “ordinary people I feel I know the most about. I show that struggles that seem so trivial to others are profound to these people.”

Along with the rural childhood captured in “Soul,” the three years Yamauchi spent in the World War II relocation camp where her father died profoundly shaped her life. They were the material for a 1981 play.

“The camps gave me a sense that I can make it anywhere and gave me more empathy for others,” she said. “I have no regrets about having been Japanese-American or regrets about what has happened, for it has made me the person I am.”