A Sturdy Vehicle

Naotake Fukushima, the fictional first man to sell Japanese cars in the United States, has a clunker on his hands.

The Sakata Fair Lady, the Japanese auto industry’s initial, late-1950s entry into the American market, is slow, flimsy and resembles a tin box. In John Olive’s play “The Summer Moon,” having its Southern California premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Naotake has been set up to fail by superiors who consider him a misfit.

Greg Watanabe, who grew up in Fullerton, plays Naotake. It’s his first starring role in Southern California. Unlike his beleaguered character, Watanabe has a terrific vehicle to ride.

The part is multifaceted and completely sympathetic. Watanabe is on stage the entire three-character, two-act play. He alternately is seen as a bewildered new arrival with a tenuous, heavily accented grip on English, and as the established, confident, humorously reflective future-self who steps forward to narrate the tale retrospectively.

Watanabe’s Naotake weeps from loneliness and frustration at his seemingly impossible task. He becomes the pupil, and, poignantly, the suitor, of Rosie Yoshida, a sweet-but-formidable nisei who is savvy about business but bitterly dismissive of what she sees as hidebound, sheepish traditional Japanese ways.

Finally, Naotake faces his harrowing crisis when kidnapped by Arnie Stengel, a half-crazed former bombardier haunted by demons from a fateful World War II raid over Tokyo. With the ghosts of awful history closing in, Naotake steadies himself with the power of poetry: the beautiful, serene melancholy of classic haiku that have shaped his inner responses to life.

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Watanabe admires his character deeply.

“This Naotake fellow is such an adventurer and such a man of principle that I think of him as having the samurai spirit. He has integrity, a sense of propriety and honor.”

The 1985 graduate of Sunny Hills High School spoke recently at a restaurant near SCR over an Italian lunch preceded by lots of caffeine. The coffees and cola, he said, were a necessary wake-up jolt after an all-night session of video games at the Studio City apartment he shares with Tamlyn Tomita, his romantic interest in real life as well as on stage in her role as Rosie.

Watanabe is not so proud of his previous Orange County performance using a Japanese accent, back in his high school days. He recalls trying to regale his white buddies at a party by repeating a comic routine he’d seen about “How to Speak Japanese.” He can still reenact the series of shivers, grunts and quizzical “oohhs” that made up the sketch.

“I remember thinking it was funny. I was doing it, and at that moment it dawned on me: ‘I’m making fun of myself.’ Me doing it in a room full of white people. That was a telling point for me. You wake up in the middle of doing it, and it’s not funny at all.”

His computer consultant father was born in Colorado at one of the internment camps where Japanese Americans in California were forcibly confined during World War II. But Watanabe grew up detached from his cultural heritage. He was one of the few Asian Americans in his school; his friends were white. There were some racial barbs thrown at him in school, but he took it as part of the general abuse that kids heap on each other.

His connection to Japanese tradition was mainly gastronomic. Watanabe saw his extended family in Los Angeles only at holiday gatherings and felt disconnected from their more Old World ways.

“It’s hard for me to say why I felt uncomfortable with them. It wasn’t that I disliked or resented them. I just didn’t fit in.” The internment era casts an important shadow over “The Summer Moon,” fueling the unresolved anger that drives Rosie. It was not, says Watanabe, a historical presence in his upbringing.

“I was totally not in touch with that at all. I don’t recall ever hearing it mentioned in family gatherings or sitting down with my parents.”

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It is the theater that has been his most important conduit to his own heritage, Watanabe said. His path began to take shape during his junior year at UC Berkeley, in an acting class he took as an elective while majoring in English literature.

“There was a level of emotional expression that really resounded with me, something I felt but never had done before,” he said. “Rather than thinking, ‘Oh, I want to perform,’ it was, ‘This feels really right. It’s the only thing that excites me.’ ”

He co-founded an Asian American theater group at Berkeley, then dropped out short of graduation in 1989 to begin a four-year hitch with the Imagination Company, a children’s theater troupe that toured California, putting on comic performances at elementary and junior high schools.

Meanwhile, he became affiliated with the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. Watanabe got meaty parts playing Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans in plays by such dramatists as Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang. “Doing these plays was not only an education as an actor, but as an Asian American. I had to overcome denial and understand that no matter how American you are, that’s where you come from, and there are good and bad things you take from it.”

Playing Naotake was a new challenge: Watanabe had never played a Japanese character before.

He came to the role in 1996 at the Sundance Theater Lab in Utah; the artistic director of the Berkeley Repertory Theater had recommended him to Jerry Patch, the SCR dramaturge who was part of a team helping to develop “The Summer Moon.”

Watanabe had initial misgivings about being cast in a play about the Japanese and Japanese American experience written by a white Minnesotan. He asked Gotanda for advice, and the playwright urged him to take the role but be ready to challenge anything that rang false.

As it turned out, Watanabe said, there was little to feel uncomfortable about. He was bothered by the use of the epithet “Jap,” which he regards as “the J-word” equivalent to the “N-word” slur on blacks. But he could see its artistic validity in the play’s rendering of how Americans would have responded to a Japanese car and its seller in 1958-59. Mainly, Watanabe saw the opportunity and appeal in the role: “It was such a big part, it seemed wonderful. I loved that it was not a stereotype, the salary man, or the samurai from the old movies.”

To play a Japanese man, the highly Americanized Watanabe drew in part upon the mannerisms and bearing of his father and others in his family. “Otherwise, it was just like approaching any other role where I had to learn an accent.

“I feel completely comfortable,” he added. “Just drawing on inner things, knowing I can go as deep as I want, that somewhere in me, in the blood, subconsciously,” is a Japanese core.

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Olive said he knew right away that Watanabe was the man to play Naotake.

“He’s able to combine the comedy in it with the emotional passion underneath it, the understated Japanese emotionality of it,” the playwright said in an interview from his home in Minneapolis. “He’s got that quality--your heart just goes out to him. He just makes you identify with [Naotake], and it’s such a delightful quality for this role.”

Watanabe didn’t have to audition for the part when “The Summer Moon” was first produced last year at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. Mark Rucker, director of the SCR production, had worked on “The Summer Moon” at the Sundance workshop. He wasn’t about to tinker with what he also sees as a perfect match of actor and part.

Though he has kept in touch with his closest high school friends, Watanabe said he has no sense of homecoming as he performs in a community he believes he had to leave to truly find himself. “It’s just another place to put on a show for me.”

His career is still in the struggling-for-recognition phase. Watanabe soon could be at loose ends: He was living on unemployment checks when he got the part at SCR and thinks he may have to go back to working as an office temp when “The Summer Moon” ends. He moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles two years ago, hoping for parts in film and television.

“Things have been really slow,” he said. “As I look at the whole picture, it doesn’t seem there’s much at all. Some [Asian American] people get good roles, and they’re making a living and not doing anything insulting. But there are other guys in line before me.”

Among those rooting for Watanabe is Pamela Wu, producing director at Watanabe’s artistic nurturing ground in San Francisco, the Asian American Theater Company.

“Everybody could see there was a lot of talent there. I think everybody feels he has a very good shot at a career as an actor,” she said. But Wu also cites the dearth of roles for Asian Americans.

“I think the world is beginning to change, but I don’t think it’s changed yet.”

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“The Summer Moon,” runs through Dec. 5 on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $18-$45. (714) 708-5555.

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Mike Boehm can be reached by e-mail at mike.boehm@latimes.com.