Nephew of the Regiment : The much-decorated all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team figures in almost all of actor-writer Lane Nishikawa’s works. His latest effort involves the unit’s liberation of Dachau.

Lane Nishikawa isn’t the kind of actor who sits around waiting for the phone to ring. As one of the standout talents to emerge from the vast field of solo performers that proliferated during the 1980s, he tends to make his own work.

Fortunately, the strategy has paid off. The veteran actor-writer, who was affiliated with San Francisco’s Asian American Theatre Company for nearly two decades, is perhaps best known for his acclaimed solo shows exploring Asian American identity, which have toured extensively around the country and been seen on PBS.

Yet unlike many soloists, he also performs frequently in ensemble works. Instantly recognizable onstage--with his trademark sonorous voice, dancerly grace and muscular physique--Nishikawa has appeared in major regional theaters such as the Mark Taper Forum (in “Sansei,” in 1989), as well as in the work of such highly regarded film directors as Wayne Wang (“Eat a Bowl of Tea,” 1989) and Wim Wenders (“Until the End of the World,” 1991).

“Lane has great strength and power, as an actor and a man,” says director Benny Sato Ambush, who has known Nishikawa for 13 years. “The influence of his Japanese ancestry is evident in his personality and in his performing. There’s a way he walks, a way he moves and a way he delivers a line that is unusual or deep in that way.”

Those qualities have been much in evidence of late, as Nishikawa has been on a regional theater roll. Earlier this year he appeared in Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Ballad of Yachiyo,” at South Coast Repertory. And on Thursday, he brings “The Gate of Heaven,” which he conceived, co-authored and acts in, to San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. This latest was written with Victor Talmadge, who also appears in it, and it is directed by Ambush with playwright David Henry Hwang serving as dramaturge.

“The Gate of Heaven” is a fictional account based on actual stories, charting 50 years in the lives of two friends--the Japanese American Kiyoshi “Sam” Yamamoto and the Jewish Leon Ehrlich--who meet when the former helps liberate the Dachau concentration camp, where the latter is a prisoner.

Although it is a two-character play, it isn’t as much of a departure from Nishikawa’s solo shows as it might at first appear. “In almost every show that I’ve written, I’ve talked about the all-Nisei battalion of soldiers who fought for America in World War II or my uncle [who fought with that battalion],” said the actor over a pre-theater dinner during the Costa Mesa run of Gotanda’s “Ballad of Yachiyo.” “It’s a part of Japanese American history that people don’t even know about.”

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Inevitably, the introduction of a second character broadened Nishikawa’s ongoing exploration of Asian American identity. “It started off as a play about true friendship,” the San Francisco-based artist says. “Then, as we were examining that--and you can’t help it, if you have a Jewish friend and a Japanese friend--[the issue of race and culture] comes in and out.”

So, while Nishikawa and Talmadge may not have intended to look at intercultural relations, the topic was also hard to avoid. “We didn’t set out to do that,” Nishikawa says. “But when you have the backdrop of the U.S., you can’t help talk about [race relations] when you’re talking about different cultures.”

The task, Nishikawa says, is to find the points where different groups and individuals can meet. And one thing all cultures in this country seem to have in common is the need for respect.

“When you give someone respect, you get respect, and that’s how a friendship starts,” Nishikawa says. “Too many people of color are just not given respect from the get-go.”

Respect is long overdue, Nishikawa says, for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) detachment that fought for America in World War II and helped liberate Dachau--even as their own family members were interned back home in the United States.

Nishikawa has long known of the 442nd--which was part of the 522nd Artillery, the most highly decorated unit in U.S. military history--from tales his uncle used to tell. But it wasn’t until recently that the actor came face to face with the European vestiges of the unit’s legacy.

While on tour with his solo show “Life in the Fast Lane,” Nishikawa decided to take a detour to investigate some 442nd history. “I had heard that they liberated Bruyeres, France,” he says. “So I went, and there’s a small monument there dedicated to the 442.

“They’re in the history books in this town,” he continues. “All the French children learn about the 442, their liberators from the Germans.”

It was a revelation for the American-born and reared Nishikawa. “There are moments [like that] in your life where you just go, ‘I can’t believe it,’ ” he says. “In Europe, they’re treated with such respect, and here we don’t even know about them.”

His concern with respect--a word that crops up often in a conversation with the gracious and magnetic Nishikawa--stems, he says, from a boyhood spent growing up in California and Hawaii.

Nishikawa, now 40, was born in Wahiawa, on the island of Oahu, and moved with his family to San Francisco when he was very young. But each year he was sent back to spend the summer with his grandparents in Hawaii. And the experience left an indelible impression.

“In Hawaii, as an Asian person, one has [respect] totally, because [Asians are] the majority of people,” Nishikawa says. “The white guys giving you [expletive] in a bar are the ones that the Samoan bouncers come and throw outside. Whereas here, I’m the one who gets arrested.

“In Hawaii, if you’re not Asian, you don’t mess around with the Asian people. You just don’t.”

In the Bay Area, however, Nishikawa didn’t feel nearly so empowered. “I was going the way of a bad kid in high school,” he says. “Most of my friends were pretty much just into drugs.”

Nishikawa wasn’t so far gone, however, that he couldn’t see how bleak his future might be. “When I got out of high school, I decided that if I wanted to go to college, I had to change.”

After enrolling at San Francisco State University, Nishikawa discovered that he had a particular affinity for writing poetry. “I found a voice, a way to channel all that energy,” he says.

Good fortune--in the person of a guidance counselor named Sue Hayashi--was also on his side. Seeing the young writer’s interest in the arts and ethnic studies, she steered Nishikawa toward the city’s Asian American Theatre Company, where her son, Eric Hayashi, was then managing director.

There, Nishikawa found what was to become his home base for nearly two decades thereafter. “The Asian American Theatre Company was doing something 20 years ago that no other theater company was doing--developing writers--and that’s why I got involved,” he says.

It wasn’t long, however, before Nishikawa began to try his hand at other aspects of theater craft. “I became an actor after I got involved with AATC,” he says. “And over the years, I’ve done everything in the theater company, from running lights to being artistic director. The company was my home, artistically and creatively.”

Nishikawa was artistic director of the AATC from 1986-1990 and 1993-1994, and associate artistic director from 1990-1993. Over the course of the 18 years he spent with the company, he was involved in more than 50 productions, alternatively as actor, writer, director or dramaturge.

Nishikawa’s first solo show, “Life in the Fast Lane,” premiered at AATC in 1981 and has since toured extensively. His “I’m on a Mission From Buddha” premiered at AATC in 1990, was seen at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1991 and was subsequently adapted for television and aired nationally on PBS in 1994.

“Buddha,” which is the best known of his works, is a multicharacter monologue featuring 18 different vignettes about Asian American life. In the course of a lean 90 minutes, Nishikawa portrays characters as diverse as a stand-up comic, a redneck father and his much-hipper son, and a putatively autobiographical artist who’s struggling with conflicted feelings about not-for-profit creativity.

As an actor, Nishikawa has performed in dozens of plays at AATC and elsewhere and is also a company member of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre.

Nishikawa’s most recent solo, “Mifune and Me,” is about the image of Asian Americans in popular culture, and was first presented in 1994 at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley.

Also in 1994, Nishikawa stepped down from his post as artistic director. “I needed to pull back from running the Asian American Theatre full time to focus on my own work,” he says.

Nishikawa’s decision to leave AATC was prompted, in part, by burnout in light of the uphill battle now facing such companies. “The monies are not as easy to get anymore,” he says, referring to both the public and the private grants that have been the lifeblood of many small community-specific organizations since the 1970s.

The criteria set up by the decreasing pool of major funders tends, Nishikawa says, to favor larger institutions. “Unfortunately [for] the small companies that do all the [research and development with new playwrights] there are no grants from these funding sources, which is unfair,” he says, referring in particular to the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, which targets grants for ethnic programs, but only for larger theaters.

Another problem, according to Nishikawa, is that the few Asian American writers who have broken through to mainstream success (including himself, as well as Gotanda and Hwang) only are available in limited ways to the smaller companies.

“It’s important that audiences at the Taper, South Coast Rep and the Old Globe see these kinds of plays,” he says. “But [small Asian American theaters] won’t be able to get the premiere from Gotanda or Hwang, whom we helped develop over the years.”

The solution, Nishikawa says, is clear, though not simple. “What the Asian American theater companies have to do is develop young writers,” he says. “And they have to find grants that can help with that.”

Meanwhile, Nishikawa will continue to make his own way, as he has with “The Gate of Heaven.”

During Nishikawa’s final year at AATC, he met actor-playwright Victor Talmadge, who is Jewish and has many relatives who were killed in the concentration camps. Not long thereafter, they became collaborators.

“The Gate of Heaven” was performed in a smaller production at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington last April, around the time of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. “It has the moving simplicity of truth,” wrote Lloyd Rose in the Washington Post.

“It demonstrates how you bridge difference,” says Ambush, who also feels a personal connection to the project because he is an African American who is one-quarter Japanese and, as he recently discovered, had an uncle who fought in the 100th infantry battalion, which was the other all-Japanese American Army unit.

“This is a road map,” he continues. “This is how you do it, the hard way, which is the only way. It’s not just a pronouncement of the ideal.”

For Talmadge and Nishikawa, it has also been a case of art imitating life. “We needed to start from go to get up to speed on each other’s culture, but that was [also] what the characters do,” Talmadge says. “So as we were learning about each other’s cultures, we were writing that into the characters.”

“I knew I wanted [this play] to be about two men who became friends because of a moment, and it lasts their whole lives,” adds Nishikawa, referring to the characters Sam and Leon, but perhaps also to the artistic rapport he has developed with Talmadge. “Really, it’s about wanting to help another human being.”

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“The Gate of Heaven,” Old Globe Theatre, Simon Edison Center, Balboa Park, San Diego. Opens Thursday. Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Through April 7. $28-$32. (619) 239-2255.