About writerWakako Yamauchi (born in 1924) is a Nisei Asian American female writer. She is also one of the most distinguished contemporary Asian American women writers. Though she paints and writes prose as well as poetry, she is especially known as a playwright and for her theatre loving .
(Picture is from Bookcover of Songs My Mother Taught Me, by Wakako Yamauchi. Reproduced by permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. )
About story
Acoording to University Minnesota's website, it is a story talks about two farming families who are challenged with surviving the Great Depression. In several interviews, Yamauchi explains that she had only to remember and re-envision her own experience with farm life to craft the details of the lives of the characters in the play. The two mother-father-daughter families struggle with adjusting to American life without forsaking their Japanese traditions.
Hana Murata . . . Carol A. Honda
Murata . . . Ron Nakahara
Masako . . . Roxanne Chang
Oka . . . Norris M. Shimabuku
Emiko Oka . . . Dawn A. Saito
Kiyoko . . . Yuko Komiyama
Review
Review wrote by Stephen Holden ( March 25, 1990 )
''And the Soul Shall Dance,'' Wakako Yamauchi's Depression-era drama, remembers the time when California law forbade Japanese immigrants to own their own land. Farmers who had come to the United States in search of a better life were obliged to sign two-year leases on the property they cultivated. Many families found themselves moving from farm to farm eking out a subsistence living. Their treatment as second-class citizens was profoundly demoralizing; added to the language and cultural barriers they faced, it made social and economic assimilation extremely difficult.
Ms. Yamauchi's play had its premiere in Los Angeles in 1977 and was brought to New York two years later by the Pan Asian Repertory Theater, which is reviving it at the Apple Corps Theater. Her drama is an acutely observant study of how these social pressures affect two neighboring farm families in California. Murata (Ron Nakahara), his wife, Hana (Carol A. Honda), and their 11-year-old daughter, Masako (Roxanne Chang), are the hardier of the two families. Hana, who holds the family together, is a fussing, clucking matriarch with impeccable manners and a stern sense of discipline, who has deferred her own aspirations so her daughter can assimilate and have a better life.
Their neighbors are not so resilient. Oka (Norris M. Shimabuku) and his wife, Emiko (Dawn A. Saito), coexist in a state of undeclared war. After the death of Oka's first wife before she could join him in America, her family married him by proxy to her rebellious younger sister, whom they sent abroad against her will.
As portrayed by Ms. Saito, Emiko suggests a Japanese-American answer to one of Tennessee Williams's haunted wraiths. The only things sustaining her are her memories of Japan and her determination to return. A secretive, mercurial woman perpetually drunk on sake, she tiptoes unsteadily about the stage in a trancelike state of suppressed rage and dreamy longing for the past. The marriage explodes when Kiyoko, Oka's 15-year-old daughter by his first marriage, comes to live with them. The tiny nest egg that Emiko fantasized would subsidize her own departure goes to pay for the girl's movie magazines and permanent waves.
Although the drama offers sketchy information on the social and legal status of its characters, it is predominantly a psychological study of people struggling to adapt to the stringent traditions and laws of two worlds simultaneously: one they have left and one in which they are trying to forge a new identity. In the playwright's even-handed vision, Oka and Emiko are the largely helpless victims of the squeeze between the two. And the most compelling scenes are those in which the couple's bottled-up feelings explode in violence, followed by excruciating guilt and masochism.
Under Kati Kuroda's direction, the actors give psychologically detailed performances. Ms. Honda and Ms. Saito are especially impressive in their representation of opposed philosophies, one brutally practical, the other crazily romantic. Even the complicated relationship between the two second-generation Japanese-American daughters is carefully elaborated.
The production's main flaw is a lack of momentum, especially in the second act - which peters out in a final scene that seems at once abrupt and tentative. One senses that the production's admirable attempt to be accurate in many small ways inadverently subverted its overall dramatic sweep.
More information
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/yamauchi_wakako.php
