A teacher came to a small town in Kansas where there was no theater. She read some prose and poetry written by an Afro-Asian girl, not yet a teenager, and who has never seen or read a play. "You should write a play. Your style is quite visual," she tell the teen.
It is only when East meets West that one is likely to get the name Velina Hasu Houston. It is the advantages and the complexities of multicultural roots that Houston, as the daughter of an African American and his Japanese bride, instinctively weaves through her plays, many being internationally produced. In Houston's play Waiting for Tadashi, now having its world premiere at the George Street Playhouse, an Afro-Asian man, Tadashi, searches for meaning and identity.
"If I had to identify myself culturally, I would use the term nikkei, someone of Japanese decent," says the playwright, who is also an associate professor, playwright-in-residence and playwriting director at the University of Southern California School of Theater. During our phone conversation following a day's rehearsal, Houston says that because she has spent so much time in Hawaii, she also refers to herself with a Hawaiian word "hapa," which means someone of mixed race ancestry. Houston, who has written many plays and essays on mixed race identity, is pleased to hear that I have seen some of her plays and particularly remember seeing her bittersweet Tea, about a closely-knit group of Japanese war brides living in Kansas, produced at the Whole Theater Company in Montclair in 1989. But she takes a gentle exception to my question whether an artist with multi-cultural roots might have any additional insights or advantages. She states firmly that all artists write either from their own experience or from the experience that floats around in their environment. "We all have very unique stories to tell and perceive the human experience as our laboratory," Houston says, as she aligns her feelings to a quote by playwright Arthur Miller: "Writers must live a useful life."
Considering that Houston reveals herself as a mixture of Japanese by her mother and half Black Foot Indian and half African-American by her father, she says, "it is how those three distinct cultures coalesce and their reverberations that frame my cultural references." As a writer Houston says she tries to find a universal story in the midst of this specific context. "I want my plays to resonate beyond my own cultural environment."
With Waiting for Tadashi, Hasu Houston explains that although there is a diverse cultural landscape there is an aspect of the human experience to which we can all relate. While Houston says that the core story is of a mother and son's disillusionment and reconciliation, it is also based on her own family's historical events. "The family depicted in the play is similar to my own, including two sisters and an adopted brother," says Houston, allowing that it was her adopted brother who triggered her desire to write this play.
In the play, that takes place in Tokyo, Kansas and California between 1949 and 1999, Tadashi, an Afro-Asian, is on the brink of turning 50. He has been in a long-term relationship with his surrogate mother. When their relationship comes to an end, it throws him off balance. In order to stabilize himself, he feels he needs a centering force. This leads him on an odyssey to find and reconnect with his real mother, from whom he has been estranged for over thirty years. Complications occur when he finds out his mother is not his biological mom but his adoptive mother.
But, as Houston points out, the play proceeds both in the present day natural world and in a parallel world of Tadashi's imagination. While attempting to find his mother, Tadashi's own doubts and fears, as represented by demons and spirits from his past, haunt and thwart him. It is Houston's belief that while we all need a centering force in our lives the challenge is to find that centering force. Houston sees Tadashi's (our) journey to find the centering force as following a path of self-purification, as it is experienced in the Shinto faith. "It must be self-driven," she says going on to explain how her background, enriched with Japanese folk tales, fairy tales, legends, mythology and rituals, prompted her to incorporate elements of Noh and Kabuki theatrical traditions into her play. Movement for the play is under the guidance of Yass Hakoshima, a world-renowned dancer and mine, now a resident of Montclair, N.J. Original music, a fusion of jazz and Shakuhachi music and sound design, is by David Van Tiegham.
It was an unobstructed path, one without the obstacles of demons and spirits, that would take Houston from Kyoto, where she had been living since 1999, to the George Street Playhouse. Friends of Hasu Houston at the New World Theater at Amherst knew that George Street artistic director David Saint was looking for plays that explored a multi-cultural landscape. When Saint read her play, she says, "he immediately embraced it and brought it to George Street for a workshop, as part of its Next Stage Festival in the spring of 2000."
Encouraged by Saint who was already eager to not only produce it but direct it on the main stage, Houston says she did a lot of rewriting between the Next Stage and two subsequent workshops at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco and at the Sacramento Theater Company.
Houston isn't worried that people will see a different world, one they may not immediately recognize. The different cultural landscape will give way to very familiar territory -- an American family. "Although it is a very different American family," she says, "the classic mother and son conflict will speak to many people.
"David (Saint) and I clicked from the early stages of developing the play. His mother had recently died and he seemed to understand the quest of a man trying to understand himself as well as the bond between a mother and son. As a result the play became very powerful for him. The fact that he continues to understand it, and that the play continues to feed his process is very important to me."
For Houston, who was born in Japan, it was being raised in Junction City, a small Kansas town of about nine thousand people. that surprisingly nurtured and fed her artistic process. She says, "It was a huge international community, including, among many women from all over Asia and Europe, about 700 Japanese women there, all connected to the military. "I grew up in the kitchens of German, Japanese and even a few Thai women. The town was right next to Fort Riley, a big fort where the military chose to send a lot of mixed marriages. Being in the kitchen, I listened and learned what it was like to grow up in Germany, in England, in southern Italy." In fact, Houston had the whole world around her giving her "food" for thought. They were, in her words "my gateway to the world."
Hasu Houston, a single parent says she doesn't want to sound immodest but likes to brag about her children, her "brainy" fifteen year-old son, who sings, plays piano and guitar and wants to be a pediatric surgeon; and her five year-old ballerina/violinist/gymnast daughter. Of course, they may be motivated a little by a mother who received her undergraduate degree in communications, theater and philosophy from Kansas State University in 1980, and subsequently an MA in playwriting and screenwriting and PhD. from UCLA in critical studies in cinema and television. Hasu Houston has also been named by the National Japanese American Historical Society as a Japanese Woman of Merit. Three of her plays have had their world premieres over the last 18 months. She expects to finish three more over the next three years. Wouldn't that teacher from Boston, who told the little girl in that small town in Kansas to write a play, be pleased?
Using actors who understand your work is as important as having the right director. And that is why Hasu Houston says she is pleased that Tony and Drama Desk nominee ("Shogun") June Angela, who has appeared in other plays by Houston, is back with her playing a character described as Shape Shifter Dazzler. The cast also includes Takayo Fischer, another Houston player (Tea and Shedding the Tiger) and Clark Jackson (Drama Desk Award for Off-Broadway's Cobb), who will originate the role of Tadashi. Others include Danny Johnson, Sabrina Le Beauf, Sue Jin Song, and Mia Tagano. Set designer is James Youmans (Off-Broadway's Summer of 42). Three-time Tony-award winner Theoni V. Aldredge designs the costumes. The production runs January 8-February 3, 2002.
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