NARITA’S ‘SONG’ LOOKS AT ROLES OF ASIAN WOMEN

Meet the many faces of Jude Narita.

In the course of her one-hour, one-woman show, “Coming Into Passion/Song for a Sansei” (at the Fountain through Sept. 13), she introduces us to five characters with diverse personalities: funny, sad, hip, docile, brash, noble--and some who are all of the above. And although Narita’s own strong personality underscores each vignette, ultimately the show is a portrait of a culture: the experience of the Asian--specifically , the Asian female--in contemporary society.

Never fear, though, it’s all very entertaining, very accessible. We recognize at once the tough-talking, punked-out teen-ager, the eager-to-please Filipina mail-order bride (No. 852), the grown-up product of a World War II detention camp, the resolutely chipper Vietnamese hooker exhorting the benefits of her “good job.” It is apparently this last character who’s closest to Narita’s heart, both in the small picture (the girl’s inevitable doom) and the larger one: the long-held stereotype of the Asian woman as “sexual, submissive and willing.”

“That character is an answer to all the parts that have been offered to every Asian actress, pidgin-talk about sex,” she noted. “And it was something I had to come back to. Because you’re trained (Stella Adler, the Strasberg Institute), you have high ideals--then you come upon this character who makes no sense , who’s sexually available and stupid. So you sort of pull back and deny it has anything to do with you. Well, if those characters exist, and if I’m Asian, I’m going to be cast that way. So I’ve got to find the humor, the dignity, the positiveness of that person. It may not be what people want to hear. . . . “

What they want, fears Narita, who is in her 30s and was born in Long Beach, is more of the same.

“Did you see ‘Year of the Dragon,’?” she scowled. “The Asian model takes this garbage spewed at her and sleeps with the man. She’s this passive thing . Appalling. And worse for me because she was an Asian, because the perception of Asian women in this country is based on experiences with women in a country (Vietnam) where prostitution was not a matter of choice, but of survival.

“It’s not the same thing as we have here,” she stressed. “Men have gone to this other culture where they have, during war, killed women after they’ve raped them . . . cut off their breasts. Horrible things. And then they come back here. . . .”

Long apolitical herself, Narita’s involvement in the piece has brought to the surface a number of unresolved issues. The inclusion of detention camps, she explained, is important “because my mother was in one of them: She lived in a horse stall, lost everything.” And the sweet, scared mail-order bride reinforces the ugly, current specter of woman denying her dignity in exchange for an American husband--who may be old, alcoholic and perhaps physically abusive.

Even the segment on Hiroshima (told in fairy-tale form) is timely: a cautionary verse on nuclear armament. “What triggered it for me was that the Hiroshima bomb was nicknamed ‘Little Boy,’ the other was named ‘Fat Man’--and I just thought that was the sickest thing I’d ever heard.” She shrugged. “People still don’t want to hear about it. So you have to say it in a way that they’ll listen. My co-producer is always telling me, ‘You can’t lean on people too much. You have to trust that they’ll open their hearts, make their own decisions.’ ”

The piece originally bowed two months ago at the Powerhouse, to both critical and popular acclaim.

“It’s given me a great sense of power,” Narita admitted, “because in this industry an actor is pretty powerless. A writer can create some opportunities for himself, and a producer can fulfill the dreams of the writer. So now I’m getting to do all three.” A sigh. “I keep thinking about all those years I was saying, ‘Where are the parts? ‘ I guess you just get frustrated and fearless and angry and hungry enough that you disregard all the rules.”

For Narita, that’s meant being highly personal and sociologically instructive. “A lot of it is general,” she stressed. “Every woman knows about standing up for herself. But the perception of Asians is that they don’t like to rock the boat, be troublemakers: ‘That’s past, let’s get on with life’--never dealing with the pain, the loss, the injustice. So this is my view of Asian life. And sure, there’s some outrage, some things that need to be said,” she smiled, “in an artistic way.”