The ‘Warrior’ Comes to Life : It took more than a decade of dedication and rewrites to finally get Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘China Men’ onstage.

‘When I think of commitment,” says writer Maxine Hong Kingston, “I think of decades.” Which is a good thing, because it must have seemed as if it might take that long for “The Woman Warrior”--Deborah Rogin’s adaptation of Kingston’s award-winning semi-autobiographical books “The Woman Warrior” (1976) and “China Men” (1980)--to reach the stage.

Indeed, a decade or so has passed since the play, which is directed by Sharon Ott, began its stop-and-start journey from first draft to a three-city tour culminating in Los Angeles. It opens Thursday at the James A. Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood, as part of the Ahmanson-at-the-Doolittle series.

During its evolution, the project went through enough changes and false starts to try even Kingston’s Buddhist-bred patience. And Kingston wasn’t the only one for whom patience was a virtue. Producer Martin Rosen, whose projects include such films as “Smooth Talk,” the Academy Award-winning “Women in Love” and “Stacking” (which he also directed), first fell in love with Kingston’s books in 1982.

“I was absolutely struck by them,” recalls Rosen, who compares “The Woman Warrior” to Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” in its exploration of what he calls “the feminine condition.” Moreover, Rosen was fascinated by Kingston’s imagery--which painted pictures of fantastic Chinese fables and characters, such as Fa Mu Lan, the mythic woman warrior, and just as effectively invoked the “kitchen-sink realism” (in Kingston’s words) of the Chinese American community in 1950s Stockton, Calif.

Rosen says, “This was an invitation to visit a community . . . that for the most part had been quite closed, even though it is a vital part of what formed America.” Rosen quickly bought the film rights to both books, with the husband-and-wife team of writer Tom Cole and director Joyce Chopra in mind, and the Sundance Institute financed the development of a screenplay.

However, Kingston’s vivid and complex memoir of coming of age as the child of Chinese immigrants--which is really a fabric of many small stories woven together--resisted this first attempt at screen adaptation. Soon, as Rosen explains, the idea that “perhaps doing it for the theater would be a way to attack it” began to look more and more attractive. Enter L.A.’s Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum, which in 1983 commissioned Cole and Chopra to create a stage adaptation of Kingston’s books. It would be directed by Gordon Davidson, the Taper’s artistic director.

Davidson, who is also producing director of the Ahmanson at the Doolittle, recalls: “We announced the play not once, but twice--for the 1984-85 season, which was an important year for us because that was the year of the Olympics, and again for the 1986-87 season, which had special significance because it was our 20th anniversary season.”

But the play didn’t open in either season. No one was happy with it. Not Davidson, who felt that the play hadn’t found a way to tell the story of what he thought was Kingston’s true rite of passage--the actual writing of her books. And not Rosen, who recalls that the play “didn’t transport me the way the books transported me.” To Kingston’s relief, “Everybody had the nerve to pull back when things were just not perfect yet.” The play was shelved, with all concerned parting amicably.

Still, Rosen’s devotion to the project never flagged. On the trail of a new playwright, he called various literary agents. “Don’t tell me names, send me scripts,” he told them. “I don’t want to be influenced by writers (names).” After reading 60 or 70 plays, Rosen chose three -- all of which, as it turned out, were written by Deborah Rogin, a then-unknown Berkeley-based writer.

At their first meeting in 1990, Rosen asked Rogin if she thought she could tackle “The Woman Warrior” for the stage. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” Rogin replied. She was intimidated; she already knew and loved Kingston’s books, and reading “The Woman Warrior,” she has said, helped her deal with the death of her own mother. Finally, however, Rogin accepted the commission, and set to work--in her own fashion. “I got drunk, and in a month I had worked out the basic structure of the play,” she explains. “Rather than tell the story in a linear way, I had to mix myth and fantasy.” Still, says Rogin, “I thought I didn’t have a chance.”

Kingston, much to Rogin’s surprise, liked the first script. “It was centered on the mother and daughter, having a wonderful time and ‘talking story’ back and forth,” recalls the author. “Talking story” is a Hawaiian phrase for “storytelling,” and a recurring theme in Kingston’s work. All along, Kingston believed this aspect of her writing would translate well to drama.

“I write with visual images that are very powerful, and I work with talk-story,” she explains. “This means I write speeches that actors would want to say, and would want an audience to hear. Going from talk-story to the stage is very natural--more natural than writing the books.”

As much as Rogin’s first attempt captured Kingston’s themes, Rosen felt the script needed work. He had always envisioned the play as a combination of both books, and he believed Rogin’s version relied too heavily on “The Woman Warrior,” which is primarily the story of Kingston and her mother, and not nearly enough on “China Men,” which presents her father’s point of view.

“I didn’t understand the father at all,” admits Rogin. “But Martin is also a writer, and the second act, which develops the father’s character, is his contribution.” Ultimately, however, the play tells the story of what Rogin calls “a brilliant, tormented mother and her equally tormented daughter, who is initially in revolt but who ends up being what her mother wants her to be--a woman warrior.”

I n 1991, Rosen approached Sharon Ott, whom he knew through Cole and Chopra, to direct the play. Ott in turn brought it to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where she is artistic director. She calls the play a “hybrid,” incorporating aspects of Bertolt Brecht, Shakespeare, American musicals and Chinese opera. The mix of Chinese myth and American realism, she says, meant “we could broaden our palette and include structures that were non-Western.”

But as Rogin and Ott continued to open up the story, the production grew more complex--and more expensive. The Berkeley Rep decided to approach the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, and Rosen, once again, approached the Ahmanson’s Gordon Davidson to be producing partners. Davidson then brought on board producer and retired theater owner James A. Doolittle, for whom the play’s current venue--formerly the Huntington Hartford Theatre--was renamed.

The play opened in Berkeley last spring and moved in the fall to Boston. The notices were generally favorable, but some critics faulted the play’s soaring, multileveled ambitions. The Boston Globe’s Kevin Kelly argued that Rogin “would have been wiser to have settled on Kingston’s first book rather than both. Wise, again, to have tightened the plot. . . . “ At each venue, the long process of the script’s evolution continued. According to Rosen, the aim was to better integrate the various parts of the story, to make the play “seamless, rather than episodic.”

Throughout all the stages in its development, Rosen says, Kingston’s role in the production was critical. “She’s been responsive and supportive. We wanted to make sure that the essence of what she writes about is represented correctly.” Ott reports that Kingston has been anything but pushy: “She will never say, ‘That was bad because it was not what I intended.’ ”

“I don’t critique,” says Kingston, “and I don’t breathe down their necks. What I’ve learned is to give everyone their freedom. The more that I try to hang onto people and try to control them, the less they bring to the show.”

Indeed, Kingston’s hands-off approach had a profound impact on the ultimate shape of the play. Rogin became attuned to Kingston’s “implicit criticism. I’ve learned to listen for what she (Kingston) doesn’t compliment, and I work on that,” explains Rogin. Nonetheless, Rogin was horrified to learn, four years into the project, that a pivotal scene in the play hinged on what she calls her “misunderstanding” of the Woman Warrior book.

Rogin explains: “Maxine wrote that she went to bed for a year. I interpreted that as meaning that the girl (the character of Daughter in the play) had a nervous breakdown and didn’t speak for a year. A month before the show opened in Berkeley, I learned that Maxine spoke during that time. She just took to her bed because she wanted to write. Imagine Maxine keeping that a secret from me all those years! She didn’t want to throw me off.”

Kingston, however, insisted that if that was the way Rogin read the story, then that was the way she should tell it. “I had to make the character of the daughter much more fragile and vulnerable,” Rogin explains, “to be taken over by the mother’s fantasy world, and then fight her way out of it. This is a play--it doesn’t in any way substitute for the books.”

Ironically, Rogin’s misreading may ultimately have allowed her to succeed where others failed. Ott feels that the daughter’s breakdown provides the “dramatic culmination and psychological crisis” that the play needed. “The bed period is a minor part of the book ‘The Woman Warrior,’ but it becomes a central dramatic conflict for the play.” Or, as Davidson puts it, “The big metaphor of this play is that of finding one’s voice.”

The only cloud hanging over this collective admiration society is the criticism that has been leveled at the production by various members of the Asian American community. Rogin remembers encountering so much hostility from Asian American friends at the project’s outset that she began to keep her involvement a secret.

“There’s a lot of resentment about white writers’ stereotyping of Asians,” she explains. “Although the story I was telling was my own story, too, I was very careful to stay with the books. And I did a lot of research.”

Once the play opened, objections were raised about such things as inconsistencies in the dialects and accents of the all Asian and Asian American casts, and to the fact that the director, playwright and producers of the play are all Caucasian. Producer Rosen argues that the protesters, many of whom are in community theater groups, could never have taken the play to its present level. “They would in many cases prefer to have 10 different workshops instead of one big play. That’s very valid, but it’s still theirs to do,” he says.

Davidson is no stranger to such controversies. “Miss Saigon,” which just opened at the Ahmanson, drew complaints in 1990 for the original Broadway casting of white actor Jonathan Pryce in the role of the Eurasian engineer. That international flare-up prompted Davidson to organize meetings in Los Angeles on the issue.

N one of the controversy appears to faze Kingston. As a ground breaker in bringing Asian American themes to mainstream audiences, she is used to being a lightning rod for cultural sensitivities. “I think the intention of all this is to widen the world of theater,” she says. “Whenever we make a racial-cultural point, it’s always on the side of inclusiveness.”

Inclusiveness now governs Kingston’s own life as a writer, too. The process of getting “The Woman Warrior” to the stage, she says, changed her as a person. “I feel that I’ve evolved from being a solitary writer to being a more collaborative and communal person,” says Kingston. “I’ve begun to build lots of communities around me.”

These include a writing group, made up initially of Vietnam veterans, that Kingston organized after the 1991 Oakland fire, which destroyed not only her home but a novel-in-progress, “The Fourth Book of Peace.” She says, “After the fire, I thought, how am I going to start writing this thing again?” She calls her veterans’ group “my one way of living my book,” which is now titled “The Fifth Book of Peace.”

The saga of “The Woman Warrior” has been a long one, but as Rosen explains: “Dedication isn’t hard if you love the material.” Davidson echoes that sentiment when he says: “Like all good things, it doesn’t matter how long it took.” And while the story has finally made it to the stage, there’s also the screen to think about. “The dream is still to make a movie,” Rosen says.

However long that takes, Kingston plans to be along for the ride. If anything, the long process of getting her work on stage has only increased her capacity for taking things one step at a time. “I have spent a lot of my life in worlds of my imagination. I’ve only recently figured out how to be at home in the present moment.”*

* “Woman Warrior,” Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m.; also next Sunday, Feb. 26, March 5 and 12, 7 p.m.; March 16, 23 and 30, April 6, 13 and 20, 2 p.m. Ends April 23. $15-47.50. (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000.