A Grim Past Lives With Them Still

“Comfort women” is certainly one of the most cruelly ironic euphemisms ever created. It was what the Japanese called the foreigners who were enslaved during World War II to serve as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers.

Judging from “Hanako,” a new play about the comfort women, these women were among the most uncomfortable people on the planet.

Brutalized relentlessly by their captors, the surviving women were liberated physically after the war, but not psychologically. They were considered damaged goods. Often, both men and women shunned them. Some committed suicide. Others retreated into isolation and silence--a silence broken only during the past decade, as some of the women came forward to speak about their ordeals and to seek reparations from the Japanese government.

This all sounds like promising dramatic territory for East West Players, a company that has already presented a number of plays dealing with the forced encampment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Yet the value of “Hanako” is, at this point, mainly as a vehicle that introduces the subject of the comfort women into the thoughts of theatergoers. It’s not the powerful dramatization the subject demands.

Korean-born playwright Chungmi Kim set her play in 1994 in New York, far from the scene of the crime. Perhaps she was trying to demonstrate just how far the bitterness engendered by the Japanese actions can travel. Perhaps she also was trying to lure Americans into the story by making it more immediate. Nonetheless, the setting seems arbitrarily distant.

Korean immigrant Grandma (Marilyn Tokuda) lives in a small apartment within the home of her usually absent daughter. Her only current interest appears to be preparing a memorial for her long-dead brother. Her 22-year-old granddaughter Jina (Christina Ma), who is participating in demonstrations against Japan over the issue of the comfort women, tries to vary Grandma’s days by bringing home two of the elderly comfort women who are visiting New York for rallies at the United Nations.

Grandma disdains comfort women and doesn’t want to meet them, but she tries to be polite after Jina forces the issue. Tokuda’s barely tolerant glances and attempts to worm her way out of playing hostess provide a few moments of comedy in this mostly grim play.

The two comfort women, though dressed in similar traditional white gowns, have starkly contrasting personalities, which helps sustain the action for a while. Soonja Park (the invincibly magisterial Dian Kobayashi) is a gruff, tough, hard-drinking chain-smoker who dominates the conversation and can’t let go of her anger toward the Japanese. Bokhi Lee (June Angela) is smaller, snowy-white-haired, and hardly speaks a word, at least at first, leading to a degree of suspense about what she might finally say.

Indeed, it’s the taciturn Bokhi Lee who eventually says something that, more than anything else, moves the narrative forward. This turn of events is not difficult to predict--anyone is bound to wonder why Grandma is the leading character in a play about the comfort women--but for the sake of suspense we’ll refrain from specifically stating the plot’s biggest revelation.

Let’s just say that the last segment of this intermissionless play is an extended nightmare in which the characters return to memories of the World War II years in a surreal sequence that doesn’t come close to suggesting the true horrors of the war. Instead, it resembles a tawdry Halloween spook show, with haunted ghosts, sometimes of uncertain identity, appearing behind scrims to the accompaniment of queasy sound effects.

Even worse, the resolution of the present-day story is frustratingly murky, in what appears to be a case of unintended lack of clarity, instead of richly suggestive ambiguity. A genuine ending remains to be written.

Director Tzi Ma, who gets a second credit for the “ending sequence choreography,” and playwright Kim probably want to balance the small-scale realism of the bulk of the play, which admittedly may have a hard time penetrating to the back rows, with some flashy theatricality. But the last segment is nothing but flash for the sake of flash. The true story of the comfort women should be graphic enough that such manipulative effects would be unnecessary.

* “Hanako,” David Henry Hwang Theater, Union Center for the Arts, 120 N. Judge Aiso St., Little Tokyo. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., except next Thursday, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. No matinee this Saturday. Ends April 25. $20-$27. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Marilyn Tokuda: Grandma

June Angela: Bokhi Lee, Mother, Fumiko

Dian Kobayashi: Soonja Park,

Japanese Commanding Officer

Christina Ma: Jina, Hanako

An East West Players production. Written by Chungmi Kim. Directed by Tzi Ma. Set by Yuki Nakamura. Costume coordinator Naomi Yoshida Rodriguez. Lighting by G. Shizuko Herrera. Sound and slides by Miles Ono. Slide photographer Gary Kuwahara. Korean dance choreographer Dong Suk Kim. Fight choreographer Diana Lee Inosanto. Production stage manager Victoria A. Gathe.