‘Ballad’ of a Sad, Lost Soul : Philip Kan Gotanda’s Tale of Family Suicide Has Compelling, Exquisite Edge

South Coast Repertory has taken some heat for having never produced a work by an Asian American playwright--until now. With Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Ballad of Yachiyo,” a haunting story culled from the playwright’s own family history, the theater makes up for lost time in a big way.

A co-production between South Coast and Berkeley Rep, where the play had its world premiere last November, “Yachiyo” is visually exquisite. The designer Loy Arcenas provides the opal sky and green cane fields on the Hawaiian island of Kauai on a set as simple and lovely as a perfect haiku. Sliding screens define the characters’ living and working quarters and also act as scrims that reveal several beautiful and chilling images.

Director Sharon Ott orchestrates the play’s visual flow with a poet’s sense of pace and rhythm. Ott, the Berkeley Rep artistic director whose handsome production of “The Woman Warrior” played last year at the Doolittle, realizes in “Yachiyo” what she was unable to in “Warrior,” a stolid adaptation of two Maxine Hong Kingston novels. “Yachiyo” tells a story often as gripping as its canvas.

“Yachiyo” is not a perfect play. Some scenes are rich and utterly specific, others embrace the generic. Some characters are precisely etched, others wander in out of stock. But the sum total is a compelling tale, invented by a playwright as a tribute to an aunt who committed suicide while still a teenager in 1919. In attempting to figure out the details of Yachiyo’s circumstance, Kan Gotanda gives witness to and thereby honors her life. The play is a debt paid to a woman who no one could help, given the exigencies of her place and time.

Yachiyo (Sala Iwamatsu) is the adored daughter of Hisao (Sab Shimono) and Takayo (Dian Kobayashi), who send her off to live with a childless, wealthy couple who happen to owe them a favor. They hope that their daughter will find a better life there as apprentice to Hiro (Lane Nishikawa), a tortured potter, and as companion to his neglected wife Okusan (Emily Kuroda).

Yachiyo is greeted harshly by Hiro. Okusan is warm, but there is something odd about her warmth. Yachiyo manages to gain Hiro’s respect with her dedication in the pottery studio; he also notices how lovely she is. Her security slips once she passes from Okusan’s confidante to the object of Hiro’s affections. At that point, the story turns from “Jane Eyre” to “Madame Butterfly.”

Kan Gotanda, a playwright who has employed many different styles, goes here for high lyricism, switching between dialogue and interior monologue. His writing is confident, but uneven. The potter and his wife are well-observed characters, but Yachiyo’s boyfriend from home, Willie (Eric Steinberg), a union organizer for the cane field workers, seems to have stepped out of a grade-school filmstrip.

The playwright supplies offbeat details about many aspects of Yachiyo’s psyche--from her obsession with cutting out figures from the Montgomery Ward catalog to help her imagine the woman she would like to become, to her painstaking work with Hiro in the pottery studio (Kan Gotanda was once a potter himself). Yet other aspects of Yachiyo are too familiar. When she dances in the moonlight with her best girlfriend Osugi (Annie Yee), their aching-young-girl talk is so generic it sounds like an “Our Town” imitation. Yachiyo’s par-for-the-course confession, “Lately I feel so many things inside of me, sometimes I’m afraid I’m going to burst!” is repeated later as the summation of the young girl’s potential. The second time, at the play’s end, Ott saves the line from its banality with some extraordinary staging--a montage of overlapping images from Yachiyo’s life converge into a shimmering whole.

Ott also has an unerring feel for silent imagery. Okusan uses two elaborately dressed and coiffed Bunraku puppets to limn a story that foretells Yachiyo’s tragic tale. The puppets, designed by Bruce Schwartz and handled by three black-shrouded Koken (assistants in Kabuki theater), are eerily beautiful. The puppets’ limbs seems to float as they perform their prophetic slow-motion ballet, and the inexorable pull of this ancient story exacts its spell.

Ott has a wonderful Yachiyo in the graceful Sala Iwamatsu, who effortlessly embodies the adored daughter, desired lover and despised and foolish outsider. As the tortured artist who betrays her, Nishikawa keeps his conflicting impulses bubbling a bit too close to the surface; he is not helped by some overheated dialogue. As Okusan, Kuroda is superb at obscuring just how much of the disaster her character actually stage-managed, or wanted to happen.

At the opening and close of the play, Ott projects a photograph of the actual Yachiyo--wrapped tightly in her kimono, looking safe but troubled, seeing something far away. It’s a chilling photo, particularly at the end when it reveals so much more. Then, we are moved not only by the woman’s tale but also by the way Kan Gotanda has at last brought honor to her name.

* “Ballad of Yachiyo,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 11. $28-$38 (714) 957-4033. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Sala Iwamatsu: Yachiyo Matsumoto

Lane Nishikawa: Hiro Takamura

Sab Shimono: Papa

Dian Kobayashi: Mama

Emily Kuroda: Okusan

Eric Steinberg: Willie Higa

Annie Yee: Osugi Chong

Michelle Camaya, Si Hwa Noh, Tomomi Itakura: Koken, Puppeteers

A South Coast Repertory production. Co-commissioned and co-produced with Berkeley Repertory Theatre in association with AT&T; OnStage. By Philip Kan Gotanda. Directed by Sharon Ott. Sets Loy Arcenas. Costumes Lydia Tanji. Lighting Peter Maradudin. Original music Dan Kuramoto. Sound Stephen Legrand. Puppet creation and choreography Bruce Schwartz. Production manager Michael Mora. Stage manager Julie Haber.