In traditional marriages, after the breadwinning husband retires, it's not uncommon for his wife to look at her spouse lounging in front of the television with his beer in hand and wonder, "Where did the years go, and who is this man?" The phenomenon in Yohen, however, is complicated by several factors: for one, Mrs. Washington is Japanese, and Mr. Washington is African-American. Her parents were educated and affluent, his were industrial entrepreneurs. When their paths converged during the aftermath of World War II, Sumi was a divorcée, scorned by her kinfolk, and James was a GI stationed overseas.
Oh, doesn't romance always end with "they lived happily ever after"? And what could be more romantic than two young people from, literally, worlds apart, meeting and falling in love? But Philip Kan Gotanda's play reminds us that "happily ever after" is never as easy as the fairy tales would have us believe. Now both in their sixties, this couple must take stock of their accomplishments and reassess their goals. (Sumi wants to get her college degree, while James wants to coach athletics for underprivileged children.) Even more disquieting, they must determine whether they can still be a part of each other's lives.
Since the play's chronological setting is 1986, before the widespread popularity of introspection-fueled confessions, their self-examination takes several months, its progress narrated in slightly over an hour, divided into four scenes. But while the first three episodes proceed at a smoothly integrated pace, the last suddenly introduces provocative questions, only to leave them unexplored. The clumsiness engendered by the author's haste to wrap up his text leaves director Steve Scott and actors Cheryl Hamada and Ernest Perry, Jr. no recourse but to crank up the emotional intensity until the action stumbles to a soapy and disappointingly inconclusive ending.
"Yohen" is a term in pottery, referring to a "lucky accident" during the firing process that makes for a one-of-a-kind piece that may be discarded as ugly and useless, or treasured as a gift from the gods. Gotanda's play may be as imperfect as the marriage it portrays, but its theme is so universal as to raise the question of why its discussion within an inter-ethnic context is nowadays confined almost exclusively to "minority"-focused producing companies like the Silk Road Project. How different, after all, are Sumi and James' concerns from those of, say, a middle-aged Abie and his Irish Rose?.
