JC
The Los Angeles Times reviews “Tea“, the new production by Velina Hasu Houston about war brides and their lives and families. The show is currently running at the International City Theater in Long Beach, CA. This reviewer doesn’t have many nice things to say and seems to think that it is all done in a very heavy-handed way. He does mention however, that one of the few touching moments of the play is when one of the characters talks about how beautiful her mixed-race child is. Gotta love it.

“I’m not a war bride — I didn’t marry the war,” protests a Japanese woman transplanted into Kansas soil by her American GI husband.

But in many senses the five immigrant wives in Velina Hasu Houston’s “Tea” are still at war: with American culture, with their mostly well-meaning but misunderstanding husbands, with their exasperated biracial children and, perhaps worst of all, Houston suggests, with each other.

…When they’re not overwrought or silly, Houston’s monologues sing. In Fischer’s expert hands, Atsuko’s open-hearted appreciations of her late husband’s “gentle eyes” or the beauty of her mixed-race daughter are unaccountably moving.