STAGE REVIEW : ‘Tokyo Bound’ Soars Toward Comical Cultural Collisions

Amy Hill. Is that a Japanese name? A Finnish name? Neither. Perhaps because Amy Hill, child of a Japanese mother and a Finnish-American father, is exquisitely and quintessentially . . . American. Born in the Black Hills of South Dakota and reared in Seattle.

That Americanness is the best surprise in Hill’s “Tokyo Bound” at East West Players, a funny-funky romp through Hill’s growing-up years when her father wanted her to go to Finland and her mother wanted her to go to Japan and she just wanted to go to Paris.

“Helsinki or Hiroshima?” is the rhetorical question. But, lucky for us, Hill dropped Paris and chose Tokyo where, to her amazement, “everybody’s Japanese, small, dark, neat” and where she found out how irretrievably American she really is.

The rest of “Tokyo Bound” (the double meaning of bound should be lost on no one) is a humorist’s wry view of life among strangers who look familiar but aren’t, and where the jokes are mostly on her.

Plump, warm, effusive and somewhere in her mid-30s, this perceptive comedian knows much more than just how to play a room. Her standard comedy is one thing, but when she collides with her cultural multiplicity, she soars.

She’s a terrific mimic and we laugh with her as she recalls her startled encounter with nudity in the Tokyo public baths or getting “felt up” on a crowded Tokyo subway train. We laugh even harder when she tells us the guy was “so cute” that she kinda hoped he’d be on the train again the next day.

There’s something utterly beguiling about such in-your-face honesty, and Hill’s skewed vision of her experiences, along with more traditional spoofs of blue-haired talk-show hosts and 25-year-old starlets in vulgarly bouffant red dresses, keeps an audience well entertained. But things really heat up with her accounts of humorous encounters with other displaced Japanese-Americans, her inability as an emancipated woman to fit into prescribed Japanese gender roles and graphically hilarious sexual misadventures in her ongoing efforts to be “American at work, Japanese at play.”

As “Tokyo Bound” moves forward, it broadens and blossoms, ultimately becoming an affecting journey into love and marriage in Japan that leads to an acceptance and appreciation of the richness and complexity of her uncommon heritage. By finding the key to the difference within her, Hill is able to embrace it as a strengthening personal asset.

The tenderness of this realization, presented with simplicity, imagination and talent, is what distinguishes Hill’s act from your garden-variety one-person confessionals. Much like the American-born Chicanos of Culture Clash (currently flaunting their exuberant Chicanismo in “A Bowl of Beings” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center), she is part of a relatively recent phenomenon: a new generation of emerging artists who are American-born cultural hyphenates and who, by addressing the issue of being two and even three things at once (American first, but other things as well), are finding their identity within the diversity.

Anne Etue has staged “Tokyo Bound” fluidly against an unencumbered background of attractive rear projections. Hill can turn a low Japanese table into anything she pleases with the same effortless versatility she uses to transform herself into the various characters she portrays. The constants throughout are the vivacity and warmth of her own generous personality.

Curiously missing from the show is a proper ending. Hill makes getting to know her so fascinating that it doesn’t do to leave an audience wondering about too many things: what brought Hill back to the United States, how the marriage turned out, what her life holds now.

We want to know because “Tokyo Bound,” like Jude Narita’s “Coming Into Passion/Song for a Sansei” and Lane Nishikawa’s “I’m on a Mission From Buddha,” is important. It is an enlightening personal work that heightens the broader experience of living different in America and invites audiences not only to share, but also to understand it.

* “Tokyo Bound,” East West Players, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 25. $10-$12; (213) 660-0366. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

‘Tokyo Bound’

Written and performed by Amy Hill. Additional material Judith Nihei. Director Anne Etue. Sets Chris Tashima. Lights Rae Creevey. Costumes Lydia Tanji. Dramaturg Judith Nihei. Koko Choreography Merv Maruyama. Sound composed and designed by Scott Nagatani.