Jude Narita – A Write and Performer

June Narita was born in the 1950s in Long Beach, California, writer and performer Jude Narita studied acting with Stella Adler in New York and with Lee Strasberg in Los Angeles. In spite of her training, Narita was frustrated by the limited roles and opportunities available to Asian-American women. In the 1980s she decided to remedy this situation by writing and performing her own work that would allow her to explore the Asian woman beyond the limiting stereotypes of dragon lady and lotus flower.

Her 1985 one-woman show coming Into Passion / Song for a Sansei was a huge success, running for two years in the Los Angeles area. In the play, she is a newscaster aware of violence against Asians but unwilling to speak out or do anything about it, preferring to be a model minority American citizen. In her dreams, however, she experiences the violence that had hitherto been distanced by detachment. Among others, she becomes a Nisei (second-generation Japanese-American) woman, whose childhood memories are of imprisonment in relocation camps; a prostitute in Saigon during the Vietnam War, thankful for a “good job”; a Filipino woman being interviewed as a potential mail-order bride; a Japanese child in Hiroshima, running scared as the bombs drop.

In the process, she finds herself as a sansei Japanese American, able to address her own past and identify with members of other contemporary Asian-American communities. In Stories Waiting to Be Told, Narita performs plural Asian-American identities—like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Cambodian women. Included among the issues addressed by these depictions of the immigrant and post-immigrant generations of Asian women living in America is the trauma of internment camps on Japanese Americans. In this play, Narita plays a daughter who catches a glimpse of her mother’s psychic wounds from the camp. The daughter does not see a victim but a woman of great strength. The play also portrays a lesbian coming to terms with her sexual and ethnic identity as well as with the conflicting demands made by her community.

In Celebrate Me Home, Narita exposes racism perpetuated in thoughtless media images and in cultural stereotypes. This one-woman show uses comedy to address the serious issue of how to develop self-worth and pride in one’s identity amid the limiting stereotypes and limited representation of Asian women (less than 1 percent) in American media and other cultural productions. Narita takes on the media again in Walk the Mountain (directed by her daughter Darling Narita), focusing on the effects of the Vietnam War on women in Vietnam and Cambodia. In this play, Narita’s broad project is clearly to humanize “the faceless enemy” of the United States during the war and to reveal the effects of the misinformation provided to the public by the U.S. media and Hollywood.

Narita’s performances are usually minimal productions, but Walk the Mountain shows slides of burned victims of napalm, the bombing of villages, sobering statistics, and provocative quotes. The production of With Darkness Behind Us, Daylight Has Come was originally funded by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program (CCLPEP) and the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department to broaden awareness of the history of Japanese Americans before, during, and in the wake of World War II. Again Narita uses actual archival footage of the internment camp at Heart Mountain and photographs of the camp and of families in it as the backdrop to this play about the effects of internment on three generations of Japanese-American women.