PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : ‘Hannah Kusoh’ Revue at Japan America Plaza Gallery

In the Doizaki Gallery of the Japan America Plaza on Saturday, a giant cutout of a geisha’s face reminded you of a thousand classic woodblock prints--though the video screens in her eyes and the lumpen humanoids rolling out of her nose seemed scarcely in the spirit of Ukiyo-e.

This was “Hannah Kusoh,” a slick, lightweight, collaborative revue touching on the frustrations of being a young, banal, middle-class Japanese-American woman in Los Angeles today.

Divided into six parts--with each section corresponding to one of the senses--this inaugural program of the “Fresh Tracks” series could be called performance art, or truly feminist, only if you wanted to be very, very generous.

One section affirmed the inalienable right of every Japanese-American woman to be as rootless and vapid as any archetypal Valley Girl.

“The only thing Japanese about me are (sic) my name and my eyes” was the collective cry, launching a compendium of famous quotes about eyes (starting with Shakespeare and the Bible) intercut with descriptions of the surgical procedure for altering Asian eyelids to Occidental proportions.

At last: a major issue. But “Hannah Kusoh” remained so desperately ingratiating, it didn’t dare explore the implications of this kind of conformity-though-self-mutilation--or, indeed, any of the ideas it stumbled over. Instead, it settled for recycling in facile, cozy skits all the easy ironies that have always marked cultural clashes between East and West. Do we really need another “Madama Butterfly” parody in 1989?

Against the smug, gutless satire of Karen Tei Yamashita’s script--and the bland, quasi-collegiate performances by a five-member ensemble--the professionalism of Karen Mayeda’s video collages and the resourceful sound-score by Vicki Abe proved highly professional indeed. Shizuko Hoshi directed.