Examining a Family’s Roots, Future

The art of arranging flowers lies in its naturalness; an arrangement shouldn’t show the hard work that’s gone into it. The same could be said of playwriting. Alice Tuan’s “Ikebana,” now at East West Players, shows the hard work, and it means to. But hard work tends to be a burden, and Tuan burdens an occasionally lovely play with too much affect.

Iris (Deborah Nishimura) is a struggling playwright, a third-generation Chinese American who can often be found with her head forlornly on her desk, surrounded by dozens of crumpled sheets of discarded scenes. Sometimes the other characters just walk over the paper tumbleweeds. That’s because “Ikebana” is a play within a play. The play that Iris is having such difficulty writing, the story of her family, is the story she is also living.

Most playwrights limit each play to one formalistic device, but Tuan goes for two. Each of her 15 short scenes is written for a flower arrangement and its description, from the Japanese art form called ikebana. The titles, such as “Capricious” and “Living Contrast,” are projected against a black wall in Rachel Hauck’s set design. Apparently, the elegance of ikebana is infectious--I have never seen the awkward space at East West Players look so simple and elegantly well used before.

The handsome set consists of a light wood floor, cut on a bias, and a similarly diagonally cut movable sheet of glass, plus a few props that get wheeled on and off. The play also benefits from having director Lisa Peterson at the helm. She has done a great job of casting, and of keeping things grounded and real and also entertaining. Peterson has obviously found these characters delicious; this is an ensemble of deeply invested performances.

The director has particular fun with the self-reflexive scenes in which we see Iris directing the other actors, who question her every decision. House lights go on, all the more clearly to see Iris trying to hide the fact that she has no idea what she is doing.

Arranged flowers have been separated from their roots in the earth and placed in a new container, where they survive, notes a character in the play’s poetic prologue. And so it is for Tuan’s fictional family as well, with one foot in Los Angeles assimilation and the other in the old country.

Violet (Lauren Tom) is a feisty nightclub singer, who hooks up with a black flower arranger Bo (Reg E. Cathey), one of the many secrets in this culturally conflicted family. Violet’s sister Iris is the playwright, whose more tortured nature Violet loves to provoke. Their mother, Lily (Natsuko Ohama, in a quietly beautiful performance), is devoted to the Bible, and, in Violet’s view, is way too submissive to her nasty mother, the prickly matriarch Rose (Beulah Quo).

Now for the characters not named for flowers: Lily’s sister Ester (Emily Kuroda) is a successful real-estate broker with cancer, the prime secret being kept from Rose. In one particularly well-staged scene, ghostly orderlies behind a glass pane whisper out Ester’s secret to Rose, which she may or may not hear. Uncle Woodman (Ping Wu) lives with Rose. Ester’s son Ellison (John Cho) is secretly gay and likes to go by the name Rock when not with the folks.

It’s just another American family, made vibrant at times when the playwright transcends the strictures and structures holding her down. When she does she soars, and she can always count on Peterson’s vigorously theatrical imagination to launch her. Such is the case in a joyous second-act scene, “Spring Bursts,” a death scene that is truly spiritual without ever being icky or denominationally religious.

Peterson inspires a gallery of good performances. Tom gets inside of Violet, an American girl determined to avoid the bad habits of her docile female ancestors, but her determination, as well as her glamour, is a little pushed. Cho is funny as the dual-natured Ellison, a hard-working boy to his family; a drag queen who lip-synchs to Ella Fitzgerald in private.

In the end, a final family secret gets whispered to Iris, a secret we never hear. This was probably a better idea on paper than in action; it comes off as emotionally unsatisfying and overly thought out.

“Ikebana” is nothing if not overly thought out; it revels in that quality. But, amid all the metaphors and formalistic scene titles, Tuan has managed to deliver a glimpse of a vital American family struggling to respect the past and embrace the future, to escape the fate of the cut flower: a thing that has “neither life nor death.” Thanks in large measure to Peterson, “Ikebana” is much more moving than a professional flower arrangement, if sometimes just as stylized.

* “Ikebana,” East West Players, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Silver Lake, Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 22. $23. (213) 660-0366. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.