Hues and Cries : For playwright Velina Hasu Houston, it’s neither black nor white but a varied palette that touches her Amerasian sensibilities; she draws on her own remarkable background in her new play, ‘Basic Necessities’

At a time when provocateur-of-the-hour Spike Lee has raised hackles with “Jungle Fever,” his riff on interracial coupling, Velina Hasu Houston offers a radically different perspective.

Deep in the heart of Kansas, a group of Japanese women sit on traditional tatami mats, taking ceremonial tea. They include Himiko, Setsuko, Teruko and Chizuye; their last names are Hamilton, Banks, Mackenzie and Juarez. It is the late ‘60s and these strangers in a stranger land are war brides, stranded on the prairie with only young love for a lifeline.

Setsuko--one of the brides of Houston’s play “Tea”--is based on the playwright’s own mother. The other women of the tea circle are also based on the women who peopled the playwright’s childhood. Houston is the daughter of an African-American and Blackfoot Native American father and his Japanese bride, and she grew up in Junction City, near Ft. Riley, Kan.

The U.S. Army, it seems, had a policy for folks like Houston’s parents. After World War II, GIs who returned to the states with Japanese wives were stationed in certain Mid- and Southwest locations--such as Ft. Riley--away from the centers of Japanese-American population on the West Coast.

To say the least, Houston’s upbringing wasn’t quite like the Nelsons’. But then, the Santa Monica-based Houston--whose new play “Basic Necessities” bows at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater this week--is not your typical playwright.

“I’m a political person and a political playwright,” she says, seated on the anonymous tan print fabric of rented furniture in a San Diego apartment, where she is staying during rehearsals. “I can’t help but be political because I’m female and a person of color.

“If someone walked up to you and said, ‘I have this woman--she’s multiracial and a single parent raising a son on her own,’ people would probably picture me in the welfare office. Because of who I am and the fact that I have struggled and survived in the artistic world and in the world of single parenting and in the world of color as a multiracial, there are some politics that go hand-in-hand with that.”

During years of widespread conservatism, working in regional theaters typically controlled by white males, Houston has broken color and sex barriers and defied the conventional wisdom on what appeals to white audiences with her poetic dramas, based on material from her multiracial perspective and experience. She is both artist and activist, using her plays and film scripts to tackle the prickliest issues of the day, even as she maintains an outspoken role in such political organizations as the Los Angeles-based Amerasian League, which she co-founded.

“What Velina seems to promise is that she’s a restless and inquiring mind,” says Shirley Geok-lin Lim of UC Santa Barbara’s Asian American studies department. “She’s not going to stay with the same material, the same thematic tracks.”

“She’s a poet, which does not mean that her work is soft--it isn’t,” says Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien. “The obvious thing is that here is also a woman of remarkable history and parentage. It begs the question, ‘Did you take this playwright because of the area she covers?’ No. It’s a popular subject right now. We’re up to our hip boots in sensitive issues. But that’s not why we selected (her play). It’s elegant, stunning writing.”

“I believe plays should entertain, but I also believe they should enlighten,” says Houston, whose developing relationship with the Old Globe is all the more significant given the theater’s longstanding reputation for conservatism. “I will never write fluff. That’s not my cup of tea.”

Houston has stayed on the topic of cross-cultural involvement for nearly a decade--and with a markedly different take on the phenomenon than Spike Lee’s.

“There’s a lot of talk in the media now about interracial relationships,” she says. “The funny thing about it is, every time I see it mentioned, it’s always about black-white. It’s like everyone in America thinks being multiracial means being black and white, or that writing about an interracial relationship means black and white. It doesn’t.”

That distortion, says Houston, ignores a whole panoply of experiences that are no less a part of the American reality for their invisibility in the media. “In my world, most of the interracial relationships are Asian and white, or Asian and African American, or Asian and Hispanic,” Houston continues. “Even in tallying up the numbers of interracial relationships in this country, people seem to forget that there are a lot more out there that are, say, Hispanic and Caucasian or Japanese American and Jewish.”

The essence of the problem--and one continued, in Houston’s opinion, by such films as “Jungle Fever”--is that such matches have been as misportrayed as they have been misunderstood. “When I see all these stories about interracial relationships, I’m glad that other people are beginning to write about them,” Houston says. “I wish, though, that people who approached the subject matter would first go out and have one before they wrote about it.

“This whole idea of people of other races being attracted to each other because of sexual mythology is not the whole picture. The fact is, even people of the same race are attracted to each other partially because of sexual mythology. That’s just a male-female thing, it’s not necessarily a color (issue).”

Houston has combined the politics of race and gender in a number of plays. “Her tone is ‘American,’ but her heritage is a fascinating combination,” says Ron Sossi, artistic director of the Odyssey Theater, which staged “Tea” this year. “It gives her a perspective from the majority and the minority.”

What’s more unusual, Houston does not shy away from topical issues. “In today’s theater, people aren’t taking on social problems,” says Julianne Boyd, director of “Basic Necessities” and “Tea.” “Velina is one who can deal with today. She has a lot to say.”

Houston’s trilogy of works based on her family--”Asa Ga Kimishita (Morning Has Broken),” “American Dreams” and “Tea”--traces the journey of a Japanese woman who leaves her ancestral home in Japan to wed an African-American GI, and the cultural obstacles she faces along the way, in Japan, New York and Kansas.

In the first play, the conflicts of a patriarch and his daughter are played out against the old and new orders in postwar Japan. In the second play, the clash is between the African-American community in New York and the newly arrived Japanese heroine Setsuko.

“Tea,” the third part of this trio, focuses more on the community in Junction City, Houston’s childhood home. It was Houston’s breakthrough play, receiving widespread production and critical acclaim. Produced by the Old Globe in 1988 and seen at the Odyssey Theater last January, “Tea” was hailed by The Times’ Don Shirley as “impassioned and impressionistic” and for its “lyric imagery.”

“The move away from what is close biographical material (in “Morning Has Broken” and “American Dreams”) freed her,” says UCSB’s Lim. “Once she drops that biography as her foreground story and moves into the community, she is freed and that is why ‘Tea’ is so wonderfully gripping. It was a liberating experience for her, and for us.”

If that move was liberating for Houston, “Basic Necessities” should be as well. It is the story of Zelda, a liberal white entertainment executive in her early 40s, married to a younger man, who, having been turned down by agencies, decides to adopt a baby through a private legal process. She places an advertisement in the newspaper and sets herself up in a hotel, awaiting visits from mothers with available offspring.

Among the stream of candidates is a woman with a seemingly perfect baby, who happens to be multiracial. Zelda passes on this child, with the subsequent realization that she may not be as liberal as she thought she was. Eventually, Zelda ends up without a baby, but with the resolve to look inward and to her husband to solve what’s missing in her life.

“Basic Necessities” is Houston’s first non-biographical play to garner a major production. “It’s a completely different aspect of Velina that’s starting to surface, as a successful professional woman of her time,” O’Brien says. Still, race remains an important aspect of the drama--from Zelda’s Japanese-American best friend to the baby she turns down.

“The issue of race comes up in a very real way, because in the world of adoption, crass as it may seem, color is an important issue,” Houston says. “White male babies are the first choice, then white female babies, then babies from South America, then multiracial children, then babies from Mexico, then African-American females, then males. There’s a pecking order for children.”

The concern for children--multiracial and otherwise--stems in part from Houston’s own troubled childhood in Kansas. The Army’s resettlement policy--which landed about 300 American-Japanese families near Ft. Riley--had its strong and weak points.

“My guess--although the Army has refused to talk to me about it--is that they did it because they wanted to keep the women away from the power bases of Japanese, (but also) to protect the interracial families,” says Houston, now 34 years old. “That was the good thing about growing up in Junction City--I had several Amerasian friends. On the other hand, Kansas was difficult once you stepped out of the community.

“The society at large did not welcome the Japanese women,” says Houston. “The African-American community rejected us and the white community rejected us, so the Amerasian kids had to go through a lot of racial hell. I grew up experiencing a great deal of racism and the bulk of it came from African Americans. The solace was to be able to return to my Amerasian friends.”

Houston’s father died when she was 11. She went on to Kansas State University--in order not to leave her mother alone--until her mother remarried. As soon as the wedding took place, Houston recalls, she was in the car, on her way to graduate studies at UCLA, where she earned an MFA in playwriting in 1981. In 1986, Houston gave birth to her son, Kiyoshi, whom she is raising by herself.

One of the most painful aspects of Houston’s family story--one she seldom discusses--is the story of her brother George, who disappeared around Christmas, 1984, and hasn’t been heard from since. Adopted in 1957 by Houston’s parents when he was 8, George was the only Amerasian child of color in the Tokyo-area orphanage in which he had been placed.

“George came to the U.S. and became the classic misunderstood Amerasian,” says Houston. The cultural limbo devastated him and I don’t think he ever got over trying to figure out his identity. There was no language there to help him. His journey is what a lot of Amerasians go through in this country.”

To help ease the plights of the Georges of America, Houston co-founded the Amerasian League in 1986 with Phil Nash and Theresa K. Williams. “Dedicated to educating the public about Amerasian identity and culture,” the league presents cultural, social and political events.

Houston, who is also president of the league, says she and her collaborators started the organization as a way to combat the disenfranchisement they felt from other communities: “It seems that external forces are always trying to categorize us as one thing or another, as best befits their political advantage.”

Such “categorizing,” in fact, has been at the center of some of Houston’s most heated conflicts, far more directly confrontational than the politics of her plays. In an article in The Times last January about the possible creation of a multiracial census category, Houston squared off against Charles Stewart, an African-American who is chief deputy to Los Angeles-area state Sen. Diane Watson.

“The African-American community was arguing that if anybody has a drop of African-American blood, they must be labeled as African-American and they must be part of ‘our political community,’ ” Houston recalls. “Why? Because (they) need the political numbers, not because they care about them. What my argument has always been is that the ‘one drop’ theory is left over from the days of the slave masters.”

In return, Stewart and others have accused Houston of wanting to downplay or deny her African-American ancestry. “People . . . were surprised to hear of this phenomenon of a multiracial identity as a primary identity,” Stewart said. “And there was some suspicion that this was simply a repudiation of blackness born of unwillingness to identify with America’s quintessentially despised minority.”

Such thinking is counter to what Houston was raised to believe. “All of us had been raised by our parents to understand that we were multiracial and that we could not get stuck into a category because it was convenient for somebody else to do so. In the Asian community, they simply wanted us for numbers too.”

“The fact that (Houston) comes from three minorities enables her to be less parochial (than she might be) as an activist for one minority,” notes Sossi. “She has a more universal vantage.”

Houston, who teaches playwriting at USC, has a many-faceted agenda for the next phase in her career, as well as an ongoing commitment to multiracial understanding.

She has completed a screenplay based on Sawako Ariyoshi’s novel, “Not Color,” to be directed by Lee Grant. Set in the late ‘50s, the story deals with a relationship between a Japanese woman and an African-American man. Like Houston’s parents, the couple in the book meet after World War II, marry and come to the United States, although there the similarities end.

Another Houston screenplay, “Summer Knowledge,” is in its first draft. Created for Sidney Poitier and Columbia Pictures, it features an African-American man in his 50s who goes back to his hometown in the South to put old ghosts to rest.

The common thread through all of Houston’s plays, screenplays and political activities is that she both advocates an archly American individualism and takes on the most entrenched and hidden forms of racism in America.

But she worries about the possible backlash against the currently much-vaunted wave of multiculturalism, and the theatrical opportunities it has created--for now. “The kind of fear that a word like ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘diversity’ creates in some white artists is nothing but fodder for (their) shouting ‘reverse racism,’ which is something that absolutely disgusts me,” says Houston. “We are so behind in terms of having equal opportunity to have our work produced and have the same chances that white men have in the theater.

“Hopefully, theater administrators and artistic directors (will) stand up and say, ‘You know, it’s true, we only produce two women (playwrights) out of every 60 and one person of color out of every 75. We should think about presenting a more diverse palette.’ ”

The snags come at many points in the production selection process. “Unfortunately, what I’ve seen in a lot of regional theaters is that they create (ethnic or women’s) labs, and by creating these groups they feel that they’ve fulfilled their need to the multicultural community. But we get stuck in those labs and the never-ending cycle of development and readings, but never get to the stage.

“It’s an unhealthy, racist thing. It ghettoizes the artists of color and women and we can’t come to the table.”

It isn’t that Houston doesn’t see progress, she just doesn’t see enough of it--yet. “I’m in the door, but I still don’t have equal opportunity,” she says. “Being a female and a person of color and being able to survive in the theater is to me a miracle, a challenge to the odds.”