A heavy-handed spot of ‘Tea’

“I’m not a war bride -- I didn’t marry the war,” protests a Japanese woman transplanted into Kansas soil by her American GI husband.

But in many senses the five immigrant wives in Velina Hasu Houston’s “Tea” are still at war: with American culture, with their mostly well-meaning but misunderstanding husbands, with their exasperated biracial children and, perhaps worst of all, Houston suggests, with each other.

In Peggy Shannon’s new production at the International City Theatre, the toll of these internecine battles rings plangently, at times clangingly, as an excellent cast of five portrays not only desperate housewives but also husbands, children and others.

Shannon’s staging is wildly uneven, though, with too many flat-footed transitions. And Houston’s play doesn’t know when to stop hectoring us with the obvious. For every piercing insight and wistful remembrance, Houston offers a host of numbing repetitions, soul-baring overstatements and petty spats trumped up only so they can be resolved with a handy moral.

The play starts with a bang, literally, as the emotionally ravaged Himiko Hamilton (Sharon Omi) ends her life -- joining, it turns out, other members of her unfortunate American family. The most angry and outspoken of the wives, Himiko then hangs around in slip and kimono to haunt an awkward tea party held by fellow local war brides in the very room where she recently died. “We’re here today because we hurt inside,” one woman explains, in a typically overripe line.

This discordant quartet might as well wear placards to delineate the differences that have kept them at arm’s length over the years despite their common experience: uptight snob Atsuko (Dian Kobayashi), sweet old soul Setsuko (Takayo Fischer), frank hippie Chizuye (Diana Tanaka) and doll-face ditz Teruko (Patricia Ayame Thomson). Their bicker-then-bond interactions are the play’s most predictable, and weakest, elements.

Far stronger is a bold, resonant scene in which they play their husbands on a camping trip. It’s almost worth the price of admission to see Kobayashi, still dressed in Atsuko’s prim pleated skirt and church-lady sweater, matter-of-factly turn her back to relieve herself, or to witness Fischer trash-talk as Setsuko’s black husband.

There’s a similarly tantalizing glimpse of the women’s teenage children, in which the beatific Thomson emerges winningly from Teruko’s porcelain shell to diss her mom’s boot-licking marital subservience.

Shannon and company also make the most of a series of striking images: the ensemble shedding costumer Jana Ai Morimoto’s lovely kimonos en masse, revealing the quotidian American outfits underneath, or marching in line, rifles on shoulders, in an approximation of military resolve.

When they’re not overwrought or silly, Houston’s monologues sing. In Fischer’s expert hands, Atsuko’s open-hearted appreciations of her late husband’s “gentle eyes” or the beauty of her mixed-race daughter are unaccountably moving.

The extraordinarily sensitive Omi gives her full commitment to the playwright’s harshest speechifying and hoariest conventions -- Himiko does a lot of talking to her ancestors, who apparently communicate by wind chime. But Omi’s conviction pays off in a transcendently lyrical solo, with Himiko downstage recalling her mother’s suicide. Don Llewellyn’s massive set and Jeremy Pivnick’s spectacular lighting support rather than overwhelm such moments of communion.

More breakthroughs like this might bring this otherwise tepid “Tea” to a clarifying boil.

*

‘Tea’

Where: International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd.,

Long Beach

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays

Ends: May 22

Price: $32 to $42

Contact: (562) 436-4610 or www.ictlongbeach.com

Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes