Yohen

James is a brawling, retired-military boxer, a black man who helped stabilize Japan after World War II, and his estranged wife Sumi is the Japanese woman who fell in love with him -- or with the figure he cut as a victorious American soldier. The reality of living in California after the war has strained their marriage: Sumi didn't realize, for example, that black men had no status in the United States. Now, in 1986, they live in Gardena, and in a series of "dates" they examine their long, difficult relationship. The Japanese word yohen refers to a ceramic piece that's been warped or discolored in the kiln, and it becomes a metaphor, made too explicit by the playwright, Philip Kan Gotanda. Steven Anthony Jones does terrific work as James -- awkward in a tie, semialcoholic, satisfyingly gruff -- and Dian Kobayashi is strong as his placid, reserved opposite. The play itself is a bit misshapen; instead of following the most interesting threads of dependence and manipulation in James and Sumi's give-and-take, Gotanda steers things toward a decades-old regret about not having kids. But he has a sharp eye for the nuances of an interracial marriage, and his brief play evokes a broken-down love affair in greater Los Angeles with a stirring, light-fingered melancholy.