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review Naotake Fukushima is a young man facing a challenge. Dumped upon the alien shores of 1958 Long Beach with a boatload of mini-trucks and the stern edict from his Tokyo superiors to sell or die trying, Naotake (Greg Watanabe) does what any enterprising young entrepreneur would do upon setting foot in this land of opportunity. He runs like hell. Or, in this case, drives his tin-can demo pickup like hell until it runs out of gas in the middle of an Imperial Valley strawberry field in the dead of night. Here, the starched and tradition-bound Naotake is caught deer-like in the sudden harsh beam of farm forewoman Rosie Yosida's flashlight. Rosie (Tamlyn Tomita) is a brash young Nisei with the smooth patter and shell-game ethics of a, well, car salesman. An unlikely partnership is forged, and the rest is history. Or today's Camry. John Olive's "Summer Moon" is a tale of history meeting the future, of exposing old personal and cultural ghosts in the bold new glare of postwar American capitalism. It is a tale that, in its first half, often soars under director Mark Rucker's light, steady hand. Then the writing hits some heavy turbulence and the play never regains full flight. Alone, Watanabe and Tomita spark a combustible and appealing chemistry, with Naotake's endearing befuddlement the perfect foil for Rosie's swaggering confidence. That turbulence comes late in the first act in the form of Rosie's estranged husband Arnie, a loose-cannon ex-pilot seriously wounded in a bombing raid over Tokyo. The trouble with Arnie is not that he doesn't fit into Olive's postwar world, it's that he doesn't fit into Olive's play. Wedged in as a device to sling a delicate, bittersweet story of loss and discovery into the searing global arena of atomic annihilation, Arnie never evolves beyond being A Symbol, dimming the clear glow of this "Moon" and causing it finally to sink behind a cloud rather than set with a sizzle. Summer Moon at South
Coast Repertory Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714)
708-5555. Tue.-Fri., 7:45 p.m; Sat.-Sun., 2&7:45 p.m. an edited version of this
review appeared originally in the |