Theatre Review : A Common Ground in ‘Heaven’

A Japanese American officer serving in a segregated regiment helps liberate Dachau concentration camp in 1945. In doing so he rescues survivor Leon Ehrlich, a German Jew, and the two become lifelong friends. Soon, the Japanese American, known as Sam, is dropping words like “mensch” and “meshuggena,” and Leon feels a craving for sushi on the Fourth of July. “The Gate of Heaven,” a new play by Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge being given a striking production at the Old Globe in San Diego, is both an unusual history lesson and an ethnic love-fest. It is not so much an examination of racism as a treatise against it. But only occasionally is it gripping theater.

As it happens, Nishikawa and Talmadge also star as Sam and Leon, respectively. Playwright David Henry Hwang serves as dramaturge, and as I have never before seen a dramaturge listed above the director in a program, I assume Hwang was instrumental in structuring and fine-tuning “The Gate of Heaven.” The structure is not a problem. The play moves forward in time, skipping years from 1945 to 1996. The action tends to land on well-marked historical spots--the Kennedy assassination, the six-day war between Egypt and Israel--which all serve to bring out the deepest anxieties and loyalties in the two friends.

Aided by director Benny Sato Ambush’s eye for detail and by Kevin Rigdon’s stark and handsome lighting, Nishikawa and Talmadge fill in much about their characters with their bodies and their faces. While their physical aging over 51 years is conveyed beautifully, their emotional growth remains less persuasive.

Nishikawa is terrifically likable as the circumspect Sam, a Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) proud and stubborn enough to insist on his patriotism by serving overseas in World War II while relatives and friends were kept in internment camps at home. The unfair treatment he receives in return for his unusual bravery never inspires bitterness in this sweet and rather simple man. His family life is nonconflicted. His shifts from gruff to almost flirtatiously shy are fluid and appealing. He is more transparent than he thinks he is, and hilarious to watch when playing poker.

Talmadge has a harder time with the much more familiar terrain of the concentration camp survivor. Whether a high-spirited young-ish psychiatrist or a more sober and Talmudic older man, his emotional life remains theoretical. From the Israeli girl with “shiny, black eyes exploding with the life of her country” to a late-in-the-day doomed love affair with an Argentine Jew whose parents won’t let her marry him because he’s too American, Leon’s recounted heartbreaks all feel obligatory. When Leon cried for his dead mother, I squirmed in my seat, only aware I was not feeling the emotion the play insisted I feel.

Much more effective and unforced is a tragedy for Sam that ends Act 1. Collecting the remains of a loved one, Sam stares at the coffin as if he could see the face of the person contained within and weeps bitterly as Leon recites the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead beside him. The cross-cultural fusing of pain and redemption that the play keeps telling us about comes poignantly alive in this scene.

Composer Michael Roth also provides a lovely cross-cultural musical accompaniment with a Japanese flute playing the Shema, another Jewish prayer, quietly in the background. All peripheral characters are played by three silent, eloquent actors wearing the black suits and veils of Kabuki theater.

These wordless and semi-wordless sounds and images are the play’s strong suit, and director Ambush must be credited for filling in blanks of a play written so that there are practically no blanks to fill in. Far more typical is the scene that cross-cuts between Leon’s Passover sermon about the Jews being slaves in Egypt to Sam’s remembrances of the racial taunting his young children took in school. This is a play that screams: Look at the parallels here! and never tires of pointing them out.

The author’s tendency to over-explain is even in the program notes. There, in somewhat tortured prose, Talmadge notes: “The message of human solidarity of this singular event even underscores the art from through which it is told here.” But, in fact, “The Gate of Heaven” needs no additional explication. If anything, it needs less.

* “The Gate of Heaven,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 7. $22-$38. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

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Lane Nishikawa: Kiyoshi “Sam” Yamamoto

Victor Talmadge: Leon Ehrlich

Eric Almquist, James O’Neil, Erika Rolfsrud: Kurokos

Produced in association with Laura Rafaty and Benjamin Mordecai and Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays at Annenberg Center. Directed by Benny Sato Ambush. Scenic design Ralph Funicello. Lights Kevin Rigdon. Composer Michael Roth. Sound Jeff Ladman.