‘Summer Moon’ Eclipses the Realities of Life

On any given day, surrounded on the freeway by Toyotas and Hondas and Datsuns, it’s hard to imagine a time when monstrous Detroit sedans ruled the road, gasoline dribbling from every fin and chrome-plated accessory.

In the late 1950s, those fins symbolized America’s manifest vehicular destiny. There was, of course, the Volkswagen bug, yet to be fully embraced in America. But cars from Japan? Please.

Now at South Coast Repertory in its Southern California premiere, John Olive’s play “The Summer Moon” imagines what life would’ve been like for the first Japanese car salesman in California, employed by the Sakata Motor Works company (think Toyota). The man’s mission: Sell an initial shipment of 250 pickup trucks.

Olive has a fine, bittersweetly funny premise on which to build. The execution’s only OK.

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California represents “the frontier of freedom and generosity,” according to our narrator, the culturally shocked salesman Naotake Fukushima (Greg Watanabe). To this intimidated outsider, the Golden State represents a new market with new and queasy ways of doing business.

Early on, driving outside of Chino, Naotake runs out of gas. He, and his imported truck, are rescued by Rosie Yoshida (Tamlyn Tomita), a Nisei farm forewoman. They become business partners and lovers. Rosie tutors Naotake in the wily ways of American sales and strategy. She dreams of owning her own parcel of the San Joaquin Valley, farmland like the acreage taken away from her interned, American-born father and uncle during World War II.

During that same time, Naotake watched as the bombs dropped on Tokyo. Rosie’s drifter husband, Arnie (John K. Linton), served as a bombardier in the war, suffering permanent injuries during one of the Tokyo raids. It is destiny, according to Olive, that Naotake and Arnie meet and embark on a shamanistic spiritual bonding in the California desert.

If that sounds overly tidy and schematic, “The Summer Moon” is. Minneapolis playwright Olive--best known for “The Voice of the Prairie” and his film noir riff, “Killers”--knows how to craft a scene, and how to string along an audience. But his play, which throws assimilation gags up against blistering memories of the war, hasn’t yet figured out which way it’s going. At the midway point, Arnie kidnaps Naotake. He does the same to the play, and not really for the better.

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The South Coast Rep production shares some of the text’s uncertainties. Director Mark Rucker gets the job done, but he nudges “The Summer Moon” toward situation comedy, allowing the actors to underscore obvious bits of comic business or, in high-confrontation mode, the obvious explosions. (The character of Arnie is a walking time bomb, with a poetic streak.)

Even so, Watanabe is particularly good as Naotake, technically adept and graceful in every key. Tomita and Linton do what they can with some increasingly improbable encounters, though Tomita tends toward strenuousness, especially given the intimacy of South Coast Rep’s second stage.

You want it all to coalesce better, or for Olive to use the tonal contrasts more provocatively. He’s simply packing too much into, and onto, his trio of characters. (In last year’s Seattle world premiere, “The Summer Moon” had a fourth character, now cut.) Olive may be going for an American cross-cultural fable, simple and direct, along the lines of the haiku poetry of Matsuo Basho quoted freely by the narrator. But the characters finally lack the messy contradictions of real life. They’re stuck in one on-the-nose confrontation after another. “The Summer Moon” is a play in which a character says, “This is important,” when he’s about to say something important.

* “The Summer Moon,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Ends Dec. 5. $26-$45. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Greg Watanabe: Naotake Fukushima

Tamlyn Tomita: Rosie Yoshida

John K. Linton: Arnie Stengel

Written by John Olive. Directed by Mark Rucker. Set by Nephelie Andonyadis. Costumes by Joyce Kim Lee. Lighting by Geoff Korf. Composer-sound designer: Michael Roth. Stage manager: Randall K. Lum.