When Two Cultures Collide

“The Summer Moon” is a play about people who need to heal the inner wounds that history inflicts. It exists because playwright John Olive, a white, middle-aged Minnesotan, has staked an imaginative claim to a piece of Asian American history that some might complain is not his to tell.

Part history and part fantasy, “The Summer Moon” dramatizes the Japanese auto industry’s bid in the late 1950s for its first beachhead in America.

An emotional high point of the play, which opens Friday in Costa Mesa on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, is a desperate embrace between two men, an American and a Japanese.

The mental health of bombardier Arnie Stengel went permanently AWOL when his aircraft was raked by machine gun fire during a raid over Tokyo in 1945. Naotake Fukushima, the young businessman sent on a seemingly futile one-man mission to sell an ill-designed Japanese car, the Sakata Fair Lady, to Southern Californians, was there as well. Thousands of feet below Arnie, the teenage Naotake was cradled by his mother as fire and horror engulfed them.

Arnie’s madness and a magical-realist helping of coincidence bring these two men together as antagonists; Naotake’s poetic streak lets them connect as human beings. The 17th century haiku he recites to steady himself in a frantic moment instantly enthralls Arnie. Poetry becomes their bridge to mutual catharsis.

Olive, 49, grew up in Mankato, Minn., and went to college in Minneapolis--communities that at the time were virtually all-white. He never had written a play with characters who were not white. But he trusted that telling a good story backed by assiduous research, and melding fact and fiction with writing that aspires to poetry, would allow him to bridge the ethnic and racial minefields of a contemporary America finding its way--maybe--toward a multicultural equilibrium.

Actually, Olive said--his rocking chair creaking as he spoke over the phone recently from the study in the Minneapolis apartment he shares with his wife and their 3-year-old son--he was too busy writing and researching to consider what critics of cross-cultural artistic reaching might say.

“I’m aware that those kinds of questions have been put to other writers in the past who are working outside their ethnic groups or whatever, but I didn’t really think about it,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t take the questions seriously. I was just much more focused on telling the story as best I could and creating a play.”

Olive was, in fact, born in Fukuoka, Japan, near Hiroshima, where his Army doctor father briefly was stationed. The family was shipped home from Japan when Olive was 9 months old, and he never has been back.

In the late 1980s, Olive read “The Reckoning,” David Halberstam’s nonfiction account of the rise of Nissan and the decline of Ford. It dawned on him that there was a play in this early, far-reaching Japanese effort to do business in America.

Hollywood beckoned around the same time. “I was all set to take off to Los Angeles and write for television. I had a high-pressure agent and was ready to go,” he said. But when he received a $36,000 fellowship for Midwestern artists, Olive used it to fund two more years of playwriting. He stayed in Minneapolis, fell in love and saw his 1986 play “The Voice of the Prairie” (the story of a Will Rogers-like tale spinner from the dawn of commercial radio) take off with strong reviews and numerous productions around the country. Olive let Hollywood slide, although he has written scripts for film and TV movies that have yet to be produced.

“If it had not been for the success of that play, I’d probably be living in Los Angeles. I’d be wealthier, but probably not nearly as happy,” Olive said.

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He began writing “The Summer Moon” in 1993. He started with books for background, and with a call for advice on Japanese ways and manners to a family friend in Minneapolis, Victoria Hatsumi Takashima Popova. She later died of cancer, and the play is dedicated to her memory.

“You have to make imaginative leaps into the world, and the way to do that is to read. Otherwise you’re basically stuck with your experience,” Olive said. “If you’re like me and grew up in Minnesota and had a wonderful, charming life most of your life, how interesting is that? You need to explore the world and bring discoveries to life.”

Greg Watanabe, the Fullerton-reared actor who plays Naotake, first encountered Olive and “The Summer Moon” three years ago when he was thrust into the role during a workshop at the Sundance Theater Lab in Utah. In the 1960s it was a controversial question whether whites could sing the blues. Watanabe, who developed his craft at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco, admits he wondered whether whites could write about Asians.

“I was wary at the beginning. The idea of cultural colonialism was familiar to me,” the tall, slender actor said during a smoking break from rehearsals. “I was not steeped in a lot of Asian American history; I left it to trusting Asian American playwrights I’ve worked with. I felt a lot of pressure [with Olive] to be the one to say, ‘This is not right, this is not exactly accurate.’ ” Watanabe said that as he worked on the play, he got caught up in “the chance to tell a good story.”

Tamlyn Tomita, known for her film work in “The Joy Luck Club” and “Come See the Paradise,” plays Rosie Yoshida, a worldly, thoroughly Americanized Nisei farm forewoman who grapples with her Japanese heritage while schooling Naotake in American sales tactics that go against his code of honor. The two Japanese American actors say that Olive was open to their input and made some changes they suggested for the sake of accuracy and authenticity.

Watanabe and Tomita--now a couple--originated their roles last year when “The Summer Moon” premiered at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. Ken Narasaki, literary manager for East West Players in Los Angeles, read the play before it was produced, then saw it in Seattle.

“I sort of went in cringing, expecting there to be cultural stereotypes or inaccuracies, things that would be hard to take,” said the Japanese American dramatist. “But [Olive] handled it in a way I would have expected an Asian American writer to handle it--with a lot of awareness and sensitivity. As an advocate for Asian American writers, I would really rather see an Asian American write about these things. But if a writer gets it right, you have to applaud that. This was an outstanding example of somebody getting it right.”

Olive and Mark Rucker, who directs the SCR production, strive for even more authenticity and sensitivity in the play’s second staging. Rucker, director of such previous cross-cultural theatrical expeditions as the Latino humor group Culture Clash’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ classical Greek satire “The Birds,” has inserted a beckoning hand gesture Tomita learned from her mother. Playwright, director and cast met recently with Min Nitta, a retired Japanese American grower and Irvine neighbor of SCR’s dramaturge, Jerry Patch; from that, Olive corrected agricultural errors he had written into Rosie’s rhapsody about a perfect plot she finds for growing strawberries.

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In the bittersweet ending of “The Summer Moon,” we learn that Naotake, Rosie and Arnie have contributed, in improbable ways, the missing puzzle pieces that enable each to lead a less fractured life.

For all the attention to detail, Rucker said, “It’s not naturalistic. It’s poeticized and beautiful and not real in some ways, but it’s really touching to me. It makes me think about things in a good way.”

Olive is adapting “The Summer Moon” as a low-budget, independent film and has begun work on his next play, tentatively titled “Sons.” It is about trans-racial adoptions. This time, he writes from personal experience, as the adoptive father of a boy with black and white birth parents. For Olive, slices of cultural history remain a fertile, if possibly controversial, medium for sprouting plays.

“I think there is a hunger in audiences, particularly on the West Coast, where there has been such bewildering change over the last 10 to 20 years, for people to know [the times in which] they live, and what has happened here,” Olive said. “It gives you a sense of the world you live in when you know what it was like before.”

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“THE SUMMER MOON,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Friday to Dec. 5, with previews Tuesday through Thursday. Prices: $18 to $45. Phone: (714) 708-5555.