Staged by East West Players in 1977, Wakako Yamauchi's And the Soul Shall Dance became one of the company's most successful and critically acclaimed productions. The drama launched Yamauchi's career as a playwrightFootnote 1 and helped East West Players (EWP) develop a strong audience base in the Japanese American community in southern California.Footnote 2 Set in the 1930s in California's Imperial Valley, the play opens with the Japanese American Murata family surveying the damage caused by the accidental burning of their bathhouse. When the father (referred to only as “Murata” in the play) suggests that they might simply use the tub standing in the midst of razed walls, his wife Hana protests, “Everyone in the country can see us!”Footnote 3 Murata quickly dismisses her concerns: “Who? Who'll see us? You think everyone in the country waits to watch us take a bath?” (157). Hana's uneasiness nevertheless injects a fear of scrutiny into the first scene of the play and turns those in the audience into the voyeurs whom she fears.
Yamauchi adapted And the Soul Shall Dance from a short story she developed in a writing class at the University of California, Berkeley. She recalls that while her writing instructor praised “And the Soul Shall Dance,” she balked at a story that Yamauchi wrote about the Japanese American internment, criticizing it for its cynical perspective. Yamauchi relates, “I realized then that an acceptable philosophical and political point of view was important to mainstream publication, so I stopped trying for white publications and wrote for Rafu Shimpo, a local Japanese paper with an English section. They knew what I was saying.”Footnote 4Rafu Shimpo published “And the Soul Shall Dance” in a holiday supplement in 1966. When the editors of Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) decided to include “And the Soul Shall Dance” in their collection, the story came to the attention of Mako, who was then the artistic director of East West Players. Mako persuaded Yamauchi to adapt her short story for the stage,Footnote 5 a project she was able to pursue with a Rockefeller grant as the company's playwright in residence. East West Players, which at the time occupied a ninety-nine-seat theatre in Los Angeles, offered Yamauchi an intimate audience for the drama by virtue of its size, proximity to her home of Gardena, and explicit focus on Asian American artists. Staging a play with EWP could be considered analogous to publishing with Rafu Shimpo, a choice to work with and for those whom Yamauchi might trust to know “what [she] was saying.”Footnote 6
Despite the cozy environment that EWP might have provided for the first performances of And the Soul Shall Dance, the argument between Hana and Murata that opens the drama immediately sets the audience at a wary distance. Raising questions about exposure and propriety, the collapse of the bathhouse walls and the conversation that follows unmask the realist drama's “fourth wall” as the emperor's clothes. Coming at the beginning of the performance, the scene draws attention to the conditions in which the show will then proceed; that is, with a phantom wall serving as peephole and alibi. When concerns about being watched are expressed again in a later scene, they are connected overtly to the racial discrimination Japanese Americans faced before World War II. Together, these conversations, which are absent in the short story, hint that the stage can be a vexed space for those who are racially marked and thus subject to spectacular representations and suspicious observations. In this context, the spectator easily becomes an ominous figure.
Yet as Rey Chow, Josephine Lee, and others have argued, cinematic and theatrical audiences are irreducible to a single racialized and gendered gaze. Chow and Lee draw attention to the ethnic or Asian American spectator who responds to representations of those who are similarly racialized or ethnically identified in varied and unexpected ways.Footnote 7 The sense of identification aroused in such spectators might equally be expressed as praise of a performance for affirming marginalized experiences or as denouncements of the same performance as betraying those experiences through their public portrayal. Indeed, in discussions of Asian American literature, accusations of betrayal have been leveled at writers since the earliest efforts to define it as a distinct body of work. Metafictional devices in Asian American literary works in turn reflect a sensitivity to the possibility that telling certain stories might constitute a violation: by revealing a family or a community's secrets, by misrepresenting those who are less able to represent themselves, or by using others' experiences of hardship for personal gain.Footnote 8 Yamauchi engages similar concerns when she frames “And the Soul Shall Dance,” the short story, as the cautious recollections of a first-person narrator, the daughter Masako Murata.
In moving this story to the stage, Yamauchi could have preserved its circumspect narration in a monologue or in an offstage voice. After all, theatre now abounds with examples of what Brian Richardson calls “generative narrators,” including those in “memory plays” such as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. However, And the Soul Shall Dance does not rely on such figures to serve as the equivalent of the short story's first-person narrator. Yamauchi explained that the short story “had a dreamlike quality which [she] didn't think would really work on stage”; she decided instead to “involve these people [the characters] in something real, rather than just a memory type thing.”Footnote 9 Yet reviews of and advertisements for the EWP production that repeatedly characterized And the Soul Shall Dance as a memory play suggest that the performance remained haunted—as Marvin Carlson might put itFootnote 10—by the formal attributes of the fictional work.Footnote 11
Against this tendency to see the performance as simply representing Masako's memory, I propose instead that it proleptically anticipates her eventual recounting of the events as memory. Where the short story presents Masako's careful narration of the past, the play presents the process of becoming the kind of narrator who is careful about what she reveals. This process is dramatized by a shift in Masako's role in the performance from a partial surrogate for the audience to a figure who diverts their gaze. The particular constraints and possibilities of theatrical performance are not made to fit the demands of a “faithful” adaptation but become integral to a meditation on the ethics of observation that extends across short story and play. In both standing before and standing in for theatrical spectators, Masako is able by the end of the performance to stand between the audience and the play's most vulnerable character. Exemplifying what I describe here as a dubious witness, Masako is simultaneously a part of and a defense against suspect viewers who might eagerly consume what they see as ethnic spectacle and suspicious ones who might see the performance as a betrayal. A theatrical cousin to the self-reflexive ethnic narrator, the dubious witness occupies the point where the privileges and responsibilities of seeing meet the burdens and promises of being seen, offering access to ethnic communities by allowing spectators to see alongside her, even as she ultimately unsettles their view.
In Yamauchi's short story, Masako's first-person narration immediately addresses the potential charge that relating her childhood memories of interactions between her family, the Muratas, and their neighbors, the Okas, might be improper or harmful:
It's all right to talk about it now. Most of the principals are dead, except, of course, me and my younger brother, and possibly Kiyoko Oka, who might be near forty-five now because, yes, I'm sure of it, she was fourteen then. I was nine, and my brother about four, so he hardly counts. Kiyoko's mother is dead, my father is dead, my mother is dead, and her father could not have lasted all these years with his tremendous appetite for alcohol and pickled chiles.Footnote 12
These first lines suggest that sharing the incidents in the account that follows before those involved had passed away would have been inappropriate. Yet the temporal lapse that Masako allows between event and recounting infuses the story with the uncertainty of diminished recollection. Qualifications such as “possibly” and “could not have” create a sense of ongoing narrative recovery. Looking back on a brief time of Masako's childhood, the story lingers on Mrs. Oka, whose reputation as “unusual” (20) piques young Masako's interest. As he drinks with Masako's father, Mr. Oka explains that in Japan, he was married to Mrs. Oka's older sister, who passed away while he was in the United States. Her parents then arranged for him to be married by proxy to her younger sister, Emiko. While Kiyoko, Mr. Oka's daughter by his first marriage, initially remained in Japan, Emiko was sent to join him, much to their mutual misery.
References to physical abuse underscore the precariousness of the Okas' marriage. Mrs. Oka's refusal to hide the evidence of this abuse forces those who interact with the couple to decide how and if they should intervene. Masako remembers, “And sometimes there appeared to be welts and bruises on her [Mrs. Oka's] usually smooth brown face, and she would sit solemnly, hands on her lap, eyes large and intent on us. My mother hurried us home then” (20). Mrs. Oka's apparent indiscretion becomes a silent challenge to those around her to recognize the beatings. Masako, with retrospective understanding, muses, “[Mrs. Oka's] aberration was a protest of the life assigned her; it was obstinate but unobserved, alas, unattended” (21). Masako emphasizes that the community's response to Mrs. Oka's unusual behavior was not to ostracize or to gape but to turn away; her protest was thus both “unobserved” and “unattended.” This connection between observing Mrs. Oka and attending to her links the refusal to look with the refusal to assist her. Meeting Mrs. Oka's eyes, by contrast, comes to symbolize the possibilities of witnessing. Early in the story, Masako offers a particularly striking memory of Mrs. Oka: “Her eyes were large and a little vacant, although once I saw them fill with tears—the time I insisted we take the old Victrola over and we played our Japanese records for her. Some of the songs were sad, and I imagined the nostalgia she felt” (20). By looking at Mrs. Oka, Masako catches the moment when her “vacant” eyes are momentarily full, and she is inspired by that fullness to identify with Mrs. Oka, to imagine “the nostalgia she felt.”
Masako's inquisitiveness, in contrast to the refusal of her parents and other adults to observe, unwittingly comes to instantiate an ethical attendance of Mrs. Oka. She becomes a witness to Mrs. Oka's pain and later attempts to give language to her suffering. Masako thus comes to serve a role similar to that described by critic Sara Ahmed in her poignant account of living with a mother who was physically unwell:
[My mother's] pleas would sometimes just be for me to bear witness, to recognize her pain. Through such witnessing, I would grant her pain the status of an event, a happening in the world, rather than just the “something” she felt, the “something” that would come and go with her coming and going. Through witnessing, I would give her pain a life outside the fragile borders of her vulnerable and much loved body.Footnote 13
If pain, as Elaine Scarry argues, is distinguished by its radical unsharability,Footnote 14 Ahmed's witness nevertheless allows for an acknowledgment of pain that gives it a social life by drawing it outside the boundaries of the individual. By displaying physical evidence of her pain, Mrs. Oka insists that it be recognized by others. Responding as a witness to Mrs. Oka's bruises and tears, Masako threatens to make public what her mother insists should remain private as she hurries her family home. The private sphere of the home and the privacy of pain act in concert here to provide the community an excuse for turning away. When Masako recalls these interactions years later, she extends her role as witness; she not only observes but also gives an account of what she has observed. According to Scarry, “Because the person in pain is ordinarily so bereft of the resources of speech, it is not surprising that the language for pain should sometimes be brought into being by those who are not themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are.”Footnote 15 By seeing Mrs. Oka's pain and reporting it on her behalf, however belatedly, Masako ensures its persistence as a “happening” in the world, even after her death.
The penultimate moment of the short story, however, imbues observation with a more ambiguous meaning and foreshadows the theatrical adaptation's acutely ambivalent relationship to spectatorship. Describing the last time that she saw Mrs. Oka, Masako remembers going out to the desert, where she “lay on the white sand beneath a shrub and tried to disappear” (24). Thus hidden, Masako becomes an inadvertent witness to a strange performance:
Bending, plucking, standing, searching, [Mrs. Oka] added to a small bouquet she clasped. She held them away, looked at them shyly, lids lowered, demure; then in a sudden and sinuous movement, she broke into a stately dance. … The picture of her imagined grandeur was lost to me, but the delusion that transformed a bouquet of tattered petals and sandy leaves, and the loneliness of the desert twilight into a fantasy that brought such joy and abandon made me stir with discomfort. The sound broke Mrs. Oka's dance. Her eyes grew large and her neck tense—like a cat on prowl. She spied me in the bushes. (24)
Despite Masako's curiosity about what she is witnessing, the intensity of Mrs. Oka's fantasy becomes too much for her. Although she can see Mrs. Oka, she cannot see what Mrs. Oka sees, and this split in vision elicits an uneasy response. The two characters are briefly connected by the sound of Masako's stirring: Masako watches as Mrs. Oka's eyes—again the focal point of their encounter—grow large, while Mrs. Oka spies her hidden form. This crossing of looks causes a “peculiar chill” (24) to run through Masako, but Mrs. Oka, after a moment, nonchalantly resumes her performance. Masako's observation of Mrs. Oka, which in earlier moments suggests an attempt at identification and attendance, is suddenly revealed here as unwelcome spying. Mrs. Oka similarly interrupts Masako's attempt to disappear behind the shrub, and their meeting forces both into stark visibility. While Masako's presence transforms a private dance into a spectacle, Mrs. Oka's dance also turns Masako's exercise in assimilating into the landscape into an act of spying that is itself rendered the object of a suspicious gaze. The short story thus conveys the interrelated visibility of the “unusual” recent immigrant and the Americanized young Nisei: they are each rendered strange (or familiar) not just against and alongside the other, but also through the other's eyes.
Pulling away from this haunting scene, Masako recounts that Mrs. Oka passed away from pneumonia soon after and that Mr. Oka and his daughter, Kiyoko, subsequently moved away. Masako assumes that “Mr. Oka found some sort of work, perhaps as a janitor or a dishwasher, and Kiyoko-san grew up and found someone to marry” (24). After witnessing Mrs. Oka perform a dance that completely traverses the boundaries between reality and fantasy, Masako closes the story with prosaic speculations that emphasize the limits of imagination. When Masako reaches the end of knowledge and memory, she concedes narrative authority to convention.
The dramatic adaptation of “And the Soul Shall Dance” received a warm response when East West Players premiered it on 23 February 1977. Dan Sullivan of the Los Angeles Times was particularly enthusiastic, praising the show when it opened and including further thoughts on it in several subsequent articles.Footnote 16 The play won three awards from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, and it was so popular that East West Players extended its run and brought the play back in March 1978.
Although the drama retains the short story's basic narrative, it omits the latter's dual temporality, its retrospective narration and layering of past and present. Events in the play unfold in the dramatic present and proceed in a linear fashion. Despite this change, publicity materials for and reviews of the original production repeatedly described it as a kind of memory play—a “recollection” or a “reminiscence”—and often assumed that it reflected the playwright's childhood, with Masako representing Yamauchi.Footnote 17 This autobiographical reading aligned And the Soul Shall Dance with canonized American plays such as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Yet even as critics compared And the Soul Shall Dance to other American memory plays, they argued that what distinguished Yamauchi's drama was its objectivity, its simultaneously dispassionate and compassionate portrayal of the two families. Sullivan wrote, “Ms. Yamauchi neither sentimentalized nor protested [the characters'] experiences, merely noted them, with no more tenderness (but no less, either) than was called for. Mako's production had that same unblinking objectivity.”Footnote 18 Ed Kaufman remarked in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, “What emerges is a kind of onstage verite [sic] approach to the past without the usual attitudes of self-doubt, self-pity, or self-abuse.”Footnote 19 These characterizations of And the Soul Shall Dance as simultaneously personal recollection and objective recounting privilege a certain kind of remembering, one quite unlike the notion of memory that infuses the short story. The short story lends the narrator a pensive, measured quality that lacks “attitudes of … self-pity, or self-abuse,” but it also accentuates her uncertainty, capturing what Andreas Huyssen describes as memory's tendency to be “always transitory, notoriously unreliable, and haunted by forgetting, in brief, human and social.”Footnote 20 According to reviews, however, the drama was a memory play shorn of all the qualities of memory, except its function of looking back at the past.
To the extent that Masako (whether or not we see her as Yamauchi's representative) must serve as the one who is remembering or will remember, the performance both encourages and resists characterization as a memory play. Often watching the adults around her, Masako is set as the primary witness of events and as a surrogate for the audience. Yet the play also explicitly limits the purview of Masako's gaze by including scenes that take place without her. For example, the entirety of act I, scene 3 is an argument between Oka and Emiko that occurs after the Murata family has departed. Unless a production chose to depict this scene as a fight that Masako imagined, it would seem to take place objectively, without an obvious mediating perspective. This juxtaposition of scenes in which Masako acts as an onstage spectator and those in which she is absent might contribute to the perception that the performance offers (however oxymoronic) an objective memory play, since the scenes that provide “direct” access and those that Masako observe complement each other. Yet this feature of the drama also makes it difficult to see the entire performance as memory or to regard it exclusively as a reflection of Masako's perspective.
In both offering and withholding Masako as the principal vehicle of memory and perspective, the play highlights the limits of transferring first-person narration onto the stage. In other words, it accentuates rather than obscures the necessary partiality of dramatic “focalization.” Responding to a tendency to exclude drama from studies of narrative, scholars have argued that narration can also be found in theatrical form. They have, for example, observed that drama includes instances of both diegetic and mimetic narrativity and pointed to the extended narration provided by “generative narrators,” such as the Stage Manager of Our Town or Tom in The Glass Menagerie, and by offstage narrative voices.Footnote 21 This critical work has reestablished drama as a form that narrative studies should not ignore. Yet it also invites a consideration of how theatre both resists and accommodates notions of narrative perspective. Reflecting on theatrical adaptations, Julie Sanders observes, “Stage plays famously offer broader perspectives on scenes and events than the single point of view of a film camera or a first person narrator in a novel.”Footnote 22 While certain types of performance (such as solo shows) might exceed Sanders's consideration, her argument highlights the difficulty of presenting, in theatre, the single perspective that camera angles or first-person narratives are able to capture. Even with an expansive sense of narrative perspective that construes a performance in its entirety as a director or a generative narrator's vision, theatre tends to disperse attention across the stage. Focusing attention in any specific direction, while possible and common, requires explicit manipulation, whereas the reverse is more true of written and filmed narratives.
Thus, even if productions chose to position Masako as a clear surrogate for the audience (or if Yamauchi had chosen to frame the drama more explicitly as Masako's memory), the audience's wandering eyes still might stray. Furthermore, however overtly performances might direct audience perspective through Masako, spectators would always see with her, not through her. While Masako's gaze might help focus the audience's attention, she also remains an object of their attention. As Roland Weidle points out, “The simultaneous presence of focalizing subject and focalized object on stage seems to be the standard case in drama. Due to the corporeal nature of scenic presentation and the immediacy of visual perception the focalizing subjects on stage are always at the same time focalized objects.”Footnote 23 Although this dynamic might be discernible in all performances involving a “focalizing subject” of some sort, in And the Soul Shall Dance, it becomes vital to the play's engagement with witnessing and spectatorship. In other words, the formal limits of theatrical focalization intersect here with a thematic and theoretical concern with different forms of observation.
In the play, Masako's careful first-person narration gives way to a theatrical presentation that leaves the Okas' and the Muratas' lives more open to scrutiny—thus acknowledging the limits of Masako's “focalization”—but explicitly conveys misgivings about this exposure. The destruction of the bathhouse, which in the short story serves as the plot device that makes possible multiple visits between the two families, becomes an occasion to insert into the first moments of the play—through Hana's protest, “Everyone in the country can see us!”—a question about watching and being watched. The play also adds a conversation about being watched that explicitly casts observation as a threat and ties the fear of being observed to racial discrimination. When he introduces the Murata family to Kiyoko, Oka recounts his experience of taking her to a restaurant while waiting for his car to be fixed: “Guess they don't see Japanese much. Stare? Terrible! Took them a long time to wait on us. Dumb waitress practically threw the food at us. Kiyoko felt bad” (185). The play, much more than the short story, highlights the anti-Japanese sentiments in California during this era, even making a reference to California's Alien Land Law, which prevented Japanese immigrants from owning land. Set in this context, Hana's fear of people seeing the Murata family bathing in the open and Oka's anger at being stared at in the restaurant cast watching as a much more ominous activity than in the short story. The drama therefore complicates the close relationship between observation and attendance suggested in the fictional work through conversations that identify the gaze as a medium of regulation and exclusion and implicates the spectators in the audience in potentially insidious forms of looking.
Thus, while Masako is a keen observer of Emiko throughout the drama, as she is in the short story, this witnessing is set against dialogue that emphasizes the other side of observation, its association with invasive scrutiny and surveillance. In the short story, by contrast, the association of looking with spying or voyeurism does not emerge until the end, in the account of Emiko's desert dance. But just as this moment complicates the relationship between observing and attending established in the short story, a parallel scene in the play shifts our understanding of Masako's role as Emiko's witness.
On the stage, Emiko's intimate dance becomes doubly spectacular as Masako secretly watches Emiko and the audience watches both Masako and Emiko. Masako serves as the device that gives spectators (and, in the short story, readers) access to Emiko's private moment. In the performance, however, Masako's presence also offers a distraction by inserting another body in the scene, and in the play's final moments, she has the potential to effect a complete disruption of the audience's view. In order to explore this potential—which I describe as a possibility because it may or may not be realized in performance—I turn to the stage directions in both the published version of And the Soul Shall Dance and the archived scripts of the EWP production. Given Yamauchi's close collaboration with EWP in adapting her short story, I take these texts as both partial records of the original production and narratives of possible performances, to borrow from Ryan Claycomb's useful narratological analysis of dramatic texts.Footnote 24 As such, they do not substitute for the performance so much as offer insights into how EWP might have staged the play and how it might be staged in the future. Below, I include the stage directions from the published version, noting differences in the EWP script in brackets:
Masako watches as Emiko leaves. She rises slowly and picks up the branch Emiko has left. She [looks at the branch,] moves forward a step and looks off to the point where Emiko disappeared. Light slowly fades on Masako, and the image of her forlorn form remains etched on the retina. [Light slowly fades until only the image of Masako's face remains etched in the mind.] (208)Footnote 25
The play (as documented or imagined in these scripts) ends with an image of Masako looking off “to the point where Emiko disappeared.” Masako's replacement of Emiko visually (as well as her retrieval of Emiko's branch) suggests her attraction to Emiko as a different model of womanhood than her own practical and decorous mother. Yet this surrogation also disrupts the audience's visual access to Emiko. To look toward the point of Emiko's disappearance is to look through the “forlorn form” of Masako. The image of Masako, if it “remains etched on the retina” or “in the mind,” replaces the spectacular moment of Emiko's haunted dancing and ends the play.
Amid wide praise for And the Soul Shall Dance, one notable criticism emerged. A reviewer complained that the ending “disappoints” and leaves the audience “unfulfilled, wanting more resolution, more statement.”Footnote 26 Another reviewer similarly lamented that Yamauchi “leaves her ending unfinished” and calls it “an outstanding flaw.”Footnote 27 A review of a 1990 New York production echoed these critiques years later, describing the final scene as “at once abrupt and tentative.”Footnote 28 If the short story offers the conclusion these reviewers sought by explaining that Emiko passed away shortly after her desert dance and predicting the futures of the rest of the Oka family, it does so as the cap to Masako's cautious account of the past. On the stage, in contrast, Masako secures Emiko's disappearance by sacrificing her own. After Emiko dances away, we are left only with Masako's lonely form (a silhouette on the verge of becoming a short story) to focus—and obscure—our view. Much like a person walking in front of a projector, Masako returns the audience to the material present from which they had been furtively watching the lives of others and presents herself as their lone, dubious witness.
