THEATRE REVIEW:

“THE GATE OF HEAVEN” at The Old Globe Theatre

Published in Orange County Register March 1996

When the Dachau inmate opens his eyes, he realizes he has been carried off by a Japanese soldier. He is terrified, until he comes to understand that his rescuer is a member of the U.S. Army's distinguished 442nd Regiment. Years later, in San Francisco, the German Jew tracks down his Japanese-American emancipator, and a fifty-year friendship ensues. Along the way, the two compare notes about cultural identity and internment camps, racism and hypocrisy, tolerance and acceptance.

"The Gate of Heaven" is rooted in personal and cultural history. Co-writers and lead actors Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge know of what they speak. Nishikawa had three uncles who fought with the 442, the most highly decorated unit in American military history, that, among other heroic acts, liberated the concentration camp at Dachau.

Talmadge had relatives who escaped from or died in the camps. In their program notes, the playwrights tell us how the unfolding relationship between the fictional Kiyoshi "Sam" Yamamoto and Leon Ehrlich paralleled their own cross-cultural pollination and evolving mutual respect. In the play, they point out all the cultural correspondences. They underscore the analogies. They moralize; they preach. They tell us what to consider, how to feel, what connections to make and what conclusions to draw. And then, they underline every idea with an illustrative overhead projection. Nothing is left to the imagination.

Nishikawa and Talmadge the Actors seem to have much more faith in the audience than Nishikawa and Talmadge the Playwrights. Under the sure directorial hand of Benny Sato Ambush, they rely on a gesture, a facial expression, a slight movement to tell its own story, independent of the torrent of exposition and explanation. Nishikawa is radiant; he has a riveting and thoroughly engaging stage presence, and his taciturn Sam is a wonderfully believable character. Talmadge (like his accent) is erratic as the garrulous and somewhat less credible Leon.

Technically, though, the production is stark and stunning. Set against Ralph Funicello's striking, East-West, geometric scenic design, Ambush invokes Japanese theater traditions, with effective use of silent, hooded, black-clad kurokos who scuttle about on their haunches and stand in for all the secondary characters, real or imagined. Michael Roth's music and Jeff Ladman's sound evocatively interweave Asian and Semitic themes. The delicate subtleties of the technical production are at odds with the script, which should have been better served by dramaturge David Henry Hwang (playwright of the acclaimed "M. Butterfly").

But there are some very touching moments, like the reunion, when Leon finally finds Sam. And Sam's attempt to teach Leon martial arts. There are lessons to be learned here. If only they weren't taught so didactically. Setting the developing friendship against the crucial events of a changing world (the JFK assassination, the Six-Day War in Israel, the Vietnam War) doesn't always work. It's all a bit too pat.

"You have to go through hell to get to heaven," we are told repeatedly, so we don't miss the thematic importance. It seems these writers have to go through the hell of text tightening and excision, before their cross-cultural concept comes anywhere near theatrical heaven.

©1996 Patté Productions Inc.