"Suspended between Two Worlds": Interculturalism and the Rehearsal Process for Horizons Theatre's Production of Velina Hasu Houston's Tea

"Suspended between Two Worlds": Interculturalism and the Rehearsal Process for Horizons Theatre's Production of Velina Hasu Houston's Tea Susan Haedicke The characters encountered in my play Tea are based on women whom you are not apt to read about in American or Japanese history books. It is not likely that you have met them. It is not likely that you have heard their dreams or their nightmares. —Velina Hasu Houston I am suspended between two worlds. There is no harmony here. —Character in Tea Velina Hasu Houston acknowledges that the stories of Japanese women who married American soldiers after World War II represent the "history that Japan has sidestepped and about which America either never knew or never cared" ("Playwright's Note" n. pag.). These "war brides" hover between the countries of their origin and their adopted homelands, no longer welcome as Japanese and not yet accepted as American, occupying, writes Amy Ling, "the space or gulf between two banks: one is thus in a state of suspension, accepted by neither side and therefore truly belonging nowhere" (177). Ling, however, posits a positive aspect of the "between-world condition": "being between worlds may be considered as having footholds on both banks and therefore belonging to two worlds at once . . . the person between worlds is in the indispensable position of being a bridge" (177). The 1993 Horizons Theatre production of Tea in Washington, D.C.,1 strove to explore this double-sided "between-world condition" expressed by the characters and felt by the AsianAmerican community: this uneasy conjoining of two different cultures that the characters, and the women on whom they are based, live each day. This intercultural exploration turned out to be conducted more in the process of mounting the play than in the actual production. I do not wish to imply that visual, dramaturgical, and performative aspects of the production did not sometimes blend, sometimes contrast, elements from the two cultures; however, I would propose that the more startling area of the meeting of cultures occurred prior to opening night, and that without experiencing both the harmony and the tension of that intercultural exploration in the rehearsal process, the portrayal of the two cultures learning from, clarifying, and expos89 90 Susan Haedicke ing each other would never have occurred in the performance. The prerehearsal and rehearsal process was not always harmonious, for as Una Chaudhuri points out, "the problematic of interculturalism frequently takes form on that slippery ground between intentions and effects" (193). Nevertheless , a deeper understanding and acceptance of otherness, certainly inspired by the multivocality within the text itself, were the result for all those involved. Tea is the third play in a trilogy which documents the story of Houston's Japanese mother (named Setsuko in the plays), who married an American soldier of half African-American, half Native-American descent. The first two plays contrast the negative reactions of the families to the interracial relationship , first in Japan and several years later in New York. Set in the late 1960's, Tea moves beyond Setsuko's personal story to include the lives of four other Japanese women, all of whom have reacted differently to their lives in Junction City, Kansas, where the army exiled them many years before. Gathered in the home of Himiko, who has recently committed suicide, the women are watched over, chastised, and encouraged by Himiko's spirit as they take tea together; and that shared experience, during which they tell their stories, rejuvenates and bonds the women in spite of their antagonisms. Each one receives an inner strength which not only enables her to survive but also to nourish those she loves. Tea struggles with its Amerasian heritage both in its characters and its dramatic structure, paralleling the struggle in the lives of Americans of Asian descent. Houston chooses the term Amerasian because of its inclusiveness: "The term Amerasian was appealing to me because it meant an amalgam of the American and the Asian which was indivisible." Houston explains: "You're always feeling like you're made up of two or three pieces, that you're a fragmented human being. But I'm a whole being. The term Amerasian is a...