Transnational Feminist Theatre of Velina Hasu Houston Mariko HORI

ISSN 1347-2720 ■ Comparative Theatre Review Vol.11 No.1 (English Issue) March 2012

Shaping a New Communal Identity: Transnational Feminist Theatre of Velina Hasu Houston

Mariko HORI

Abstract Velina Hasu Houston, a Los Angeles-based American writer, is often regarded as a multicultural or postmodern playwright because of the characteristics of her works written from her transnational or multiracial point of view, but she posits herself as a feminist writer, resisting the labels such as “multicultural artist” or “postmodernist” that may force every “ethnic theater” into “an artistic ghetto.” She creates works revealing struggles and frustrations of transnational, multicultural and multiracial women in the white male-centered society, dreaming of a new world community where they are treated equally and with respect. Houston challenges to accepted practices by exploring theatrical innovations in her pursuit of an identity that dissolves any border. In her most successful play, Tea, her heroine, a ghost, who, having killed her husband and lost her daughter, committed suicide, crosses the border between this world and that world, listening to the interactions of four other Japanese women who are visiting her house. Scenes go back and forth; in some scenes five women enact the roles of their husbands and daughters. Such use of scenes defies chronological order; the use of geographically unfixed sets and multiple roles played by a single performer are features often seen in contemporary feminist theatre. She often re-envisions the gender relations of ancient myth and creates a new myth where individuals “transgress borders of nations and identity, forming new communities that often defy categorization.” Mina in The House of Chaos, based on the Medea myth, is a Japanese woman who defeats her husband and his male ally who conspired to drive her away to rob her of the firm she had inherited from her Japanese family. Mina’s spirit of resistance will be passed on to her daughter. Keiko in Calling Aphrodite, a survived victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, has a fictional confidante in Aphrodite, a Greek goddess of beauty, who advises her to foster “hope.” The play reveals Houston’s effort to find an ethical solution to such a difficult issue as the bombing of Hiroshima by looking at it from an angle of how one can overcome atrocious memories of war and heal pain. Houston, thus, uncovers the pain in racial antagonisms, cultural wars, social conflicts, family problems, etc. in our time, tackling complicated matters that today’s women, especially multiracial, multiethnic, and transnational women are faced with, and hoping

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for the formation of a borderless community with new communal understandings.

1. Houston as a Multiracial Feminist Velina Hasu Houston, a Los Angeles-based American writer, has been writing plays from her transnational, multiracial point of view since the beginning of her career. Born of a Japa- nese mother and an African and Native-American father, she questioned a single monoracial identity and the black-and-white binary racial categorization established in the United States since the days of slavery. It was before the idea of postmodernism began to permeate the country that she, through writing, took painstaking efforts to affirm multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural identities and transcend the borders of the traditional sense of racially and culturally divided community. Her personal heritage and upbringing naturally placed her in a challenging position to a society that is based on monocultural communities. Houston criticizes the present structure of ethnocentric communities in the United States as follows:

In the media and in sociopolitical discourse, groups of people are often identified as communities such as the Asian American community, the Latino community, the Afri- can American community, or “whites.” Each of these communities defines itself on the fictional basis of a common race. Racial commonality supposedly promises other com- monalities in ideologies, diet, cultural values and customs, politics, ethnic idiosyncrasies, artistic tastes, and so on and so forth. This concept of community divides what is ‘Ameri- can’ into ethnocentric tribes of sorts that not only compare themselves with each other to measure success, intelligence and a myriad of other sociological and political benchmarks, but also compete with each other for their respective pieces of the (economic) American Pie.” (Houston 2009. pp. 6-7)

Racial and ethnocentric ideology is, however, so deeply rooted in cultural, social, and economic systems in the United States that it is difficult to remove it and establish a new ideology. But it is possible to notice the errors of the racially based society and to realize the existence of the multiracial people who challenge the concept of identity categorized by race. Such multiracial identities seem to have received more and more recognition when a break from established ideas was promoted with the surge of postmodernism in the 1980s and of multiculturalism hailed in the United States in the 1990s. Houston’s plays have been thus rec- ognized under the categories of “postmodernism” and “multiculturalism.” Stan Yogi refers to Houston as a playwright examining “the complexities of cross-cultural and cross-racial identities” which “characterizes postmodernism in general” (Yogi 1997. p.147). S. E. Wilmer regards Houston as one of the artists who “reveal another dimension of diversity and multiculturalism where by ethnicities and religions are combined or integrated rather than separated into essentialized categories” and whose characters “register as multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and perform their hybridity, rather than allowing themselves to be clearly defined by cultural,

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and even national, borders” (Wilmer 2002. p.187). But terms such as “postmodernism” and “multiculturalism” have been argued as ambiva- lent and vague with the reason that they tend to affirm only the de-construction of the central established system without any aspiration to recreate a new system and shift back to funda- mental essentialism or conservatism. Wilmer, who commends the term “multiculturalism,” heeds the danger on the other hand that it may harden “the deep-rooted core of some value systems in America [...] fundamentally exclusionary” (Ibid. p.175). Guillermo Gómez-Peña also condemns multiculturalism, for it is “a dangerous notion that strongly resembles the bankrupt concept of the melting pot with its familiar connotations of integration, homog- enization, and neutralization” (Gómez-Peña 1994. p.27). Houston, also sensing the pitfall of the term, once quoted the words of Joanne Akalaitis, former artistic director of Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre, to defend her position by refusing to be labeled as a multicultural artist: “How do you get people on stage and in the audience to reflect the demographics of the community outside? That’s the issue. I hate to call it ‘multiculturalism.’ Call it diversity, instead. Call it reality, because that’s what it is” (Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1992; Houston 1992b). Houston here resists the term “multiculturalism” because it may force every “ethnic theater” into “an artistic ghetto as being so peculiar to the perceived palette of the subscription audience that they only can be put on the menu once a season” (Houston op.cit.). As to the idea of postmodernism, a feminist literary critic, Linda Hutcheon, in her book, The Politics of Postmodernism, critically comments on it, emphasizing the political aspect of feminism:

Postmodernism manipulates, but does not transform signification; it disperses but does not (re)construct the structures of subjectivity. Feminsism must. Feminist artists may use postmodern strategies of parodic inscription and subversion in order to initiate the deconstruc- tive first step but they do not stop there. [...] Perhaps postmodern strategies do, however, offer ways for women artists at least to contest the old – the representations of both their bodies and their desires – without denying them the right to re-colonize, to reclaim both as sites of meaning and value. Such practices also remind us all that every representation always has its politics. (Hutcheon 1989. p.168)

This feminist desire for not only resisting against the dominant power but also providing alternative “sites of meaning and value” is clearly seen in Houston’s work. Houston’s liberal and political position, therefore, should be interpreted as that of “feminism.” Houston herself writes:

Feminism is a compassionate, sensitive, and active concern for the spirit, intellect, politics, sociology, economic health, ethno-cultural identities, and emotional and psychologi- cal complexities of women; indeed for our very lives and fates. (Houston 1993a. p.13; Italics original)

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Houston, severing herself from the hailed categorization of “multiculturalism,” posits herself as an “active” feminist. As an artist, she is drawn to the lives of multiracial and multiethnic women who are suppressed by the dominant white patriarchal society in the United States and creates stories of them to educate the majority of the country that are not aware of their existence. Theater is an effective means to appeal to this white population in the United States, for most of the audience are upper middle-class white people. However, the prospects for the recognition of the multiracial and multiethnic identity in the society are bleak. Every work of Houston reveals struggles and frustrations of transnational, multicultural, and multiracial women in the white male-centered society, but has a hope and a dream to create a new community where they are treated equally and with respect. The rest of this essay will focus on Houston’s scheme of realizing her aim as a multiracial feminist playwright by examining her works.

2. Seeking an Identity That Dissolves Borders Houston, believing in what she calls the “no passing” zone, expresses her frustration of being categorized as an Asian American or an African American writer:

I believe in what I call the “no passing” zone, which is to say that I believe people should not try to pass, try to represent themselves as something other than what they are when it comes to ethnicity. [...] Because of my multiethnicity, often I also have to deal with the prejudice and racism of the communities to which I belong. [...] They [mono-ethnic per- sons] seem to feel that, once an ethnicity is mixed, all natural attributes of that ethnicity disappear in the mixture. On the contrary, the mixing strengthens and enriches the natural resources of each ingredient in the mix and the hybrid is something powerful. [...] Another reason for Asian American racism against Amerasians may be rooted in protectionism, the desire on the part of some Asian Americans to protect their community from being diluted or diminished by the presence of multiethnic offspring. [...] Being Amerasian, I am a part of the Asian American community. I like being different. And I celebrate my difference. And sometimes that disturbs Asian Americans. [...] African Americans maintain a black- white definition of ethnic identity that is an outgrowth of the plantation mentality. African Americans still are not willing to accept multiethnics for who they are. [...] Often it seems that the desire to draw a multiethnic into a traditional ethnic category stems from wanting to sustain or gain political and economic power. The desire to fight against multiethnic identity has direct correlation to how a community’s size will be represented on the U.S. census. The size of a community helps the federal government determine how many federal dollars will be allocated to that community for development of its own political/social agenda. (Houston 1998)

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This explains how deeply rooted the discrimination against mixed race is in the United States. The society “thrives on categorization” (Ibid.), says Houston. But as voices of multiracial people have been heard, studies such as multiracial studies and mixed-race studies have emerged, “challeng[ing] long-held notions about the biological, moral, and social meaning of race” (Root 1992. p.3). It was in the year 2000 that the U.S. census started to include the category “two or more races,” though people who check that category are still very few partly because of the political and economic share of the present community they belong to. Philip Tajitsu Nash critically comments on the meaninglessness of the census as long as racism ex- ists in the United States:

As the number of people checking off the “Multiracial” box after choosing one primary racial or ethnic identifier grows over the next few decades, we should continue to revisit the question of whether to alter or abolish the race and ethnicity criteria on the census. Until racism itself is abolished, however, any census that ignores the importance of race and ethnicity in the lives of Americans turns a blind eye to injustice. (Nash 2004. p.217)

Unless the political and economic system based on the bias of race and racism in the country changes, creating the “no passing” zone is difficult. Houston’s struggle may be time- consuming, but she believes that art can change people’s minds and hearts, from which the prejudice against the hybrid identity will disappear. It is her wish to create a community where people can embrace “differences with [their] whole hearts and minds” by “enriching and broadening [the] American Theater” (Houston. 1992b). Houston, through her plays, pro- motes the audience’s recognition of differences of race and ethnicity. As Steven Masami Ropp warns, it is not a utopian multiracial community to be promoted; since “the denial of race through such notions as ‘everyone will be mixed,’ or ‘race doesn’t matter’ (and here I would include the proponents of interracial marriage as a cure for racism) is misguided at best and counter- productive at worst” (Ropp 2004. p.268), but the community where any race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and class can understand and cooperate one another, respecting their differences. The community Houston dreams of resonates with what Cherríe Moraga, another Ameri- can multi-racial feminist playwright (often regarded as a Chicana feminist writer) summarizes:

Our entire concept of this nation’s identity must change, possibly be obliterated. We must learn to see ourselves less as U.S. citizens and more as members of a larger world community composed of many nations of people and no longer give credence to the geopolitical borders that have divided us [...]. Chicanos call it “Raza,” [...] an identity that dissolves borders. (Moraga 1994. p.36)

Such an “identity that dissolves borders” is thematically pursued in Houston’s plays through her main characters’ decisions to resist accepted practices imposed upon them. Her characters discover their multiethnic, multiracial, and transnational identity in hostile and

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alien environments, embracing and sustaining it until other people recognize it as respectable and powerful enough to dissolve borders. Houston’s challenge to accepted practices is also explored in her theatrical innovations. She alienates the realistic setting by adopting double, triple, or even cross-gender roles, by breaking chronological order, by going back and forth between different geographic spaces, or by transgressing boundaries between the real and the unreal, between the natural and the supernatural, or between the quick and the dead so that ghosts, spirits, illusions come into real life on earth. These elements are what Josette Féral defines as the characteristics of feminist theatre that challenge the traditional theatrical forms to “express the porous, uncentered nature of women; it is a policy favoring the fragment rather than the whole, the point rather than the line, dispersion rather than concentration, heterogeneity rather than homogeneity” (Féral 1984. p.559). Houston’s most successful work, Tea (1983), is filled with such theatrical innovations. The play, set in a remote community of an American army base in Kansas where nearly seven hundred international war brides were segregated, proceeds with the gossipy talk of four Japanese war brides gathering and having tea at now-deceased Japanese woman Himiko Hamilton’s house. Himiko, unaccommodating herself to the life there, killed her husband who had been beating her and was tried for murder. Her daughter was murdered by a stranger, stabbed and raped. In despair, Himiko shot herself. She appears and speaks as a ghost haunt- ing the house, telling us what her life was like when she was alive and sometimes responding to the conversation of the other women, though nobody notices her being there until the very last moment of the play. The information Himiko gives us is not chronological and linear. The chats the women have are not always dialogic. They complain about the discrimination against them in the United States but, on the other hand, each shows superiority or prejudice against the other women, reflecting the racial differences of their husbands. From their hostile attitudes toward Himiko and their fragmented information about her, her isolation and loneliness are conveyed, though at the end of the play, the four women finally come to terms with the impact of their shared culture and unify. They even invite Himiko to share tea with them, sensing her soul floating in the air. Himiko, in a way, brings the women together, for without her death, there is no sense of community to be formed here as the following exchange earlier in the play suggests:

Setsuko: Chizuye-san! Shame, ne! After all, this is a difficult occasion for us: the first time a member of our Japanese community has passed on. Chizu: What “community”? Himiko: (again, to the audience) Yes, what community? We knew each other, but not really ... We didn’t care enough to know. (Houston 1993b. p.171)

In the final scene of the play, the sense of community among five Japanese women is created harmoniously.

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Transgressing boundaries between the quick and the dead, and between the past and the present, is frequent in Tea and other plays by Houston. The actresses of Tea playing five women also cross borders of their sex and generation by performing male characters and girls. They enact the roles of their husbands in a scene of a campsite, who mockingly gossip about their Japanese spouses from a male point of view. In another scene, they assume young girls and perform the roles of their daughters who confront their mothers’ cultural differences with both displeasure and joyful warmth. Such triple roles of the characters alienate the audience’s expectation toward the stereotypical images of Japanese women segregated and suppressed in American society and make the spectators think of them more positive and ob- jectively. The scenes geographically jumping from Himiko’s tatami room to the campsite or the girls’ party transform the atmosphere of the play; especially the comic exchanges between the men or the girls, which give us relief from the tragic nature of the overall story. Thus, Houston fractures the fixed identity and any other fixation in her feminist approach to theatre, which, she believes, helps to do away with conventional racial, ethnic, and gendered identities.

3. Re-visioning Ancient Greek Myth Houston’s interest in ancient Greek myth and tragedy in her work reflects another way of shaping a new “identity that dissolves borders.” Using the plot or the wisdom of an ancient myth, Houston creates a new myth from her multiracial feminist point of view. A feminist American poet Adrienne Rich in her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision” emphasizes the necessity of “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (Rich 1979. p.35). “An old text” is not necessarily an ancient Greek myth in the mind of Rich, but can be an old myth as Frances Babbage interprets Rich’s words: “It was necessary that women should come to terms with ‘old’ texts, and old myths, in order to explore the possibilities of creating new ones” (Babbage 2011. p.22). Helene Foley, a scholar of the Classics, also cites the same passage by Rich as an effective aim for feminist theatre artists to “re-envision the gender relations of the [Greek ] originals” (Foley 2004. p.78).(1) Challenging the old myth from a contemporary woman’s point of view and subverting it provide us with new perspectives to contemplate the polarized gendered frictions and cultural conflicts we face in this global society. In the foreword to her manuscript of an adaptation of Lysistrata, written from an inducement of shocking news of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Houston writes:

The confusing and decimating politics that drive human beings to war have not changed

(1) A number of adaptations of ancient Greek myths and plays have been created by women playwrights, perhaps because “The voices of Greek tragic women teach us not to Know Ourselves, but to be properly humble in the face of the Unknowable” (Hall 2004) and “Greek tragedy has chimed with the obsessions of an age which has itself only just survived the man-made horrors of the twentieth century” (Hall 2004. 46).

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much since the time that Aristophanes pondered them. Avarice for power and money, ig- norance, selfishness, and hatred combine in fits of testosterone and the result is an atomic explosion of the human spirit which leaves no soul untouched, no matter how innocent. (Houston. 1992a)

Houston’s anti-war and anti-nuclear sentiment(2) becomes more obvious in her recent play Calling Aphrodite (2006), also a play inspired by a Greek myth. Her love of ancient Greek myth cultivated through her readings of classical myths is registered in the heroine of the play. It is a play about two sisters, Keiko and Shizuko, who are the so-called Hiroshima maidens victimized by an atomic bomb and sent to the United States to receive plastic surgery operations. Keiko had been good-looking and flattered by men until she was disfigured and completely depressed by the atomic bomb. Shizuko who had been in every sense inferior to her sister also was disfigured but saved by Christian faith and positive thinking. Shizuko, however, dies at the end of the play by an overdose of anesthetic during her operation. A fictional Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, whom Keiko used to admire as her con- fidant in her imagination, appears after the war to tell her the meaning of beauty, that is, in other words to foster “hope” from despair. Responding to this advice of Aphrodite, the play ends with optimistic words from Keiko who survived the war and the surgery, finally accept- ing the abominable scars on her body as a symbol of her hope: “I’ve grown used to it. It is a part of me. Everyday, I have my own flowers. The world is full of possibility…You must tell the story. Of your hard times. And laugh twice. Be. Not. Afraid” (Houston 2007. p.62). This sounds too optimistic a message to the Japanese audience who often consider the Hiroshima maidens’ plastic surgery as U.S. propaganda to compensate for their actions in Hiroshima while many Americans think it a heroic and humanistic act rendered to the enemy.(3) Calling Aphrodite thus reveals Houston’s attempt to find an ethical solution to such a difficult con- troversial issue by looking at it from an angle of how one can overcome atrocious memories of war and heal pain. She entrusts healing power as tantamount to hope. With that power, we

(2) Houston has dealt with the issues of war from the beginning of her career. Her early trilogy, Asa Ga Kimashita (1980), American Dreams (1983), and Tea (1983) are based on her mother’s experience just after Japan lost the Pacific War. Houston’s mother’s marriage with an African-Native American soldier was not easy, facing her Japanese family’s opposition, her husband’s family’s antagonism, and the prejudice against the war brides in the society of the United States. Waiting for Tadashi (2000), another autobiographical piece by Hous- ton whose brother was adopted from an orphanage in Japan, is about an Amerasian orphan’s odyssey to find his adopted mother from whom he has been estranged for twenty years. It is again a tragedy caused by war—many mixed-race babies were abandoned by their mothers who were often single mothers suffering from poverty and shame in the post-war Japan. But the descriptions of war in those plays were indirect while Calling Aphrodite is the new challenge Houston tackles to face the war and Hiroshima more directly, though here again her interest lies in “the ‘double’ voices and visions of war-affected people as they share collective memories” (Hara 2011). (3) Calling Aphrodite was produced as a staged reading by Tokyo Engeki Ensemble in August 2008. The script (I translated) was adapted, with Houston’s approval, by the director Sawako Shiga partly because Houston’s egalitarian rendition of American viewpoints and her treatment of the moment of the bombing would sound a mere fiction to a Japanese audience.

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may be able to erase our feelings of hate and hostility. It may then lead to dissolving gendered and cultural barriers, and avoiding confrontation or battle. The House of Chaos (2007) is another of Houston’s recent adaptations of ancient Greek myth. She wrote it with the hope of creating a more clearly “feminist” adaptation of the Medea myth than her earlier work Kokoro which is often labeled by critics as a re-creation of the Medea myth, which she “resists” (Houston 2008b) because Yasako, the heroine of Kokoro, abandoned by her Japanese husband who has an affair with another woman, attempts to drown herself with her child — a parent-child suicide [oyako shinju] — not for revenge but from her loss of hope about her future. The play’s focus lies in the cultural difference between Japan and the U.S. where oyako shinju is not common and an infanticide is legally treated very severely.(4) Both plays, however, are similar in the sense that they focus on a Japanese immigrant woman married to an unfaithful man. But Mina, the protagonist of The House of Chaos, is more confident and stronger than Yasako. She is more controlled and smarter than the original Medea. Unlike Medea, she does not kill anybody. Instead, Mina, facing discrimination, struggles jointly with the lover of her husband, her rival, against their tyrannical male counterparts who conspired to drive her away to rob her firm she had inherited from her Japanese family but in the end fail, losing their battle with the women. Mina, standing at the cultural borders between Japan and the United States, not only wins her gendered and racial battle with white American men but also gains an economic advantage over them. She teaches her daughter Naoko to succeed her strength as an independent woman living in a for- eign country, saying “Promise me when you grow up you’ll belong to no one” (Houston 2008a. p.62). The question of belonging is a universal issue, but seeking a place to belong to is risky because it often requires a compromise with other people in the name of sameness. To belong to an accepted community is like an imprisonment. Houston here suggests that we discard the idea of belonging to somewhere and be free by “belonging to no one.” This is in other words to be what Moraga portrays as “members of a larger world community, composed of many nations of people and no longer give credence to the geopolitical borders that have divided us” (Moraga.op.cit.). Such a transnational identity is explored in another of Houston’s plays, The Eyes of Bones, inspired by Sophocles’ Oedipus. In this play, the pain of Oedipus marrying his mother and losing sight is divided into two contemporary women’s sufferings; one is a woman doctor of an indeterminate ethnicity who loses sight of her eyes due to a traffic accident and the other a Japanese woman who conceives a child of her genetic father. The woman of an indeterminate ethnicity, Ashling, suffers not only from her lost sight, but also due to the fact that her boyfriend who caused the accident has disappeared from her life, though he comes back after

(4) Kokoro is based on the legal case of “Fumiko Kimura a 32 year-old immigrant who came from Japan 14 years earlier, tried to drown herself. Her infant daughter and her four-year old son by entering the ocean on Santa Monica Beach after learning of her husband’s extramarital affair. She survived but her children did not. She was charged with murder, but 4000 local Asians signed a petition claiming that in Japan oyako shinju is not considered murder. In the end she pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received five years probation” (an educational material kept in Velina Hasu Houston Papers Box 62 at the Huntington Library).

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a long absence and proposes marriage, which she turns down. Miyako, the Japanese woman, committed incest without knowing it because her father disappeared when she was little and her turmoil is aggravated by social ostracism. She left Japan for Hawaii and met Ashling. Despite the fact that both are recovering from depression and loneliness, they declare that they will live with pride and strength. Houston subverts the myth by changing the gender of the original myth and by altering Greek gods’ punishments on men into the women’s hopeful choices and by handling their lives positively. What is perceived as the victimized acquires “an identity that dissolves the borders” which is provided by “mana,” the natural beauty and power of Hawaii. Hawaii is geographically located between the mainland of the United States and Japan so that it is a dissolving point in the name of a border. But the borders that should be dissolved are many, not just the border between Japan and the United States, although Houston often writes about people who struggle between the two cultures. As she writes in her essay “Notes on Identity” quoted in the previous chapter, she used to identify her multiracial, multicultural heritage as “Amerasian,” but the term “Am- erasian” only designates two cultures: “America” and “Asia.” After taking a DNA test with six other playwrights of mixed-race Asian descent for a collaborative omnibus work called The DNA Trail: A Genealogy of Short Plays about Ancestry, Identity, and Utter Confusion (2010),(5) Houston embraces a more expansive view of her identity including not only Japan, Africa, and Native American Indians, but also Cuban and Latin American ancestries. In the DNA project, she and the other artists all discovered that they and we have roots from Africa. It is time for us to be free from our man-made “fictional” categorization of race, which is ridiculous when most of us possibly have a mixture of multiple blood origins. Houston’s reworking of ancient myths, thus, is re-visioning and reclaiming them through her radical multiracial feminist intervention that shifts with time but always unsettles the dominant white male order.

4. Creating a New Communal Identity Breaking existing cultural, social and political borders is intrinsic to Houston’s plays. As Naomi Iizuka, another American multiracial playwright says in her essay “What Myths May Come,” “The theatre artists who are working in the most exciting ways are creating new fusions or hybrids from old material.” (Iizuka 2009. p.196), Houston challenges classical myth and creates “new fusions” and “hybrids” from them by “inscribing” the most complicated contemporary issues in her plays. She thus seeks an “identity to dissolve” existing community borders with her strong feminist ethics and aesthetics. She states in an interview in The Sacramento Bee (March 4, 2001), “If I’m able to transcend the specifics of any culture or gender and connect with people, then I feel that I’ve been successful.” The task of a playwright is, if I may borrow Iizuka’s expressions, to create a “new shape” (Iizuka. op.cit. p.198) from old material, to expose pain in us with “a knife to cut through the

(5) The DNA Trails: A Genealogy of Short Plays about Ancestry, Identity, and Utter Confusion was produced in Chicago in 2010 and in Los Angeles in 2011. I saw it on January 22, 2011, at University of Southern California. As for the project, see Houston 2010b.

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skin” (Ibid.), which is “the act of remembering” (Ibid. p.194, p.201). Moraga similarly enunci- ates, “All writing is confession. Confession masked and revealed in the voices and faces of our character. [...] The wound ruptures and…heals” (Moraga. op.cit. p.35; Italics original). As a multiracial playwright frequently focusing on racial and cultural conflicts between Japan and the United States, Houston, through her act of remembering, uncovers the pain in racial antagonisms, cultural wars, social conflicts, family problems, etc. in our time. She lets us hear her confession in her beautiful and elegant way, tackling complicated matters that today’s women, especially multiracial and transnational women, are faced with. Her plays are filled with her exquisite lyrical poeticism that reverberates with hope, esperanza, for the future, for the formation of a borderless community with new communal understandings as is seen in her own comment:

The kinds of plays that can create community and have a critical impact on identity are plays that illustrate journeys that take convention to task with regard to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and/or sexuality. Such plays represent worlds where individuals transgress borders of nations and identity, forming new communities that often defy categorization. Many individuals around the globe live outside of the boxes of standard identification. When they are exposed to plays that reflect the shifting, mutating, and disintegrating of boundaries vis-à-vis identity, there is recognition of the capacity for a new hybrid culture – immigrant-based or multiracial. (Houston 2011)

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Dr. Velina Hasu Houston who joined in person the session “Rei- magining Global/Local Community via Theatrical Innovation” at the FIRT/IFTR Annual Conference in Osaka and kindly gave me good advice and suggestion for this essay.

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