THEATER REVIEW : Intimate, Profound Telling of ‘Stories’

Jude Narita hits pay dirt once again doing what she does best: Providing, in her new show at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, a series of singularly well-crafted portraits of Asian and Amerasian women that form a kind of logical sequel to her first show: “Coming Into Passion/Song for a Sansei.”

Narita’s new collection, titled “Stories Waiting to Be Told/The Wilderness Within,” focuses more specifically on mothers and daughters. By chance or on purpose? Or are we more conscious of the coincidence because of the popularity of that Asian mother-daughter film “The Joy Luck Club”?

Undoubtedly the latter, particularly when you consider that Narita created “Coming Into Passion” in 1987 and was even ahead of Brian Nelson’s stage adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel, which took to the podiums of the Mark Taper’s now-defunct Literary Cabaret at the Itchey Foot Ristorante in December, 1989. Besides, “Club” focused on Chinese-American women and “Passion” on Japanese-American women along with other Asian denominations.

Narita’s “Coming Into Passion” demonstrated the difficulties and brutalizing effects of cultural assimilation, but her “Stories Waiting to Be Told” taps into those difficulties from a more philosophical perspective. Cultural difference is here taken as fact. Her concerns go on to focus on its fallout: on intergenerational difference and how women--mothers and daughters chiefly--cope with it. Or not.

No one does this better than Narita, who can change personality with the glint of a dimpled smile, the exchange of a jacket or an ashen hesitation in the voice.

From the wispy, haunting strands of Japanese music performed offstage by longtime associate George Abe, to the unhurried simplicity of Colin Cox’s staging, Narita becomes in turn a jilted girlfriend; a North Korean woman obsessed her whole life long with finding two brothers lost in South Korea; an Amerasian accidentally awakened to lesbianism, who finds the courage to confront her mother with her sexual preference; a dopehead’s harsh rehabilitation in the face of an overwhelmingly destructive past; the high school taunting of a new arrival from Korea, and her humorous handling of the miscreant.

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There are 10 stories in all, each distinct and widely different from the others, but each, in subtle ways, full of the significance of culture as direct influence on all situations. This includes the daughter who can talk to her mother about anything except life in the relocation camps (“It’s a crime to complain about yourself”) or the Korean wife who would face anything rather than admit that there might be something wrong between her and her husband.

In that sense, “Stories Waiting to Be Told” are American stories, intimate stories of cultural adaptation whose intimacy sometimes cries for a context warmer than the Center’s desolate Theatre 2.

The territory covered here is no longer unfamiliar, but Narita’s work is always fresh, always precise and, when the occasion calls for it, it can be profoundly moving. The writing itself has everything to do with this: Spare, pointed and, in this case, larded with just enough philosophical reflection to make us sit up and take notice.

“It’s not the mind that remembers, it’s the body,” says one of the many women we meet. True. Just as it’s not the ear that hears, but the senses as a whole. One absorbs this show, as if by osmosis. And its cultural nods, however specific, will find plenty of recognition among other immigrant cultures.

* “Stories Waiting to Be Told/The Wilderness Within,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, Theatre 2, 514 S. Spring St., downtown. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 11. $12; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.