“If the spirit is murdered, what is left?” asks a character in Velina Hasu Houston’s play “Waiting for Tadashi,” which made its debut at Wyatt Pavillion on Friday night, under the direction of Peggy Shannon.

The play is a somewhat surrealistic look at the life of the offspring (“a hybrid thing so rare”) of an African-American soldier and a young Japanese girl. The child was abandoned at birth, and spent his early years in an orphanage, where he was consistently ridiculed and abused. Tadashi is ultimately adopted into a biracial home, yet always feels the misfit, as he struggles to reconcile his abusive past with his present. The play deals with race, identity and culture. It is the story of a young man’s journey to ultimately accept himself, love himself, and forgive himself for something utterly out of his control.

There are difficulties for the audience at the outset of this play. The program does not make clear who is playing which part, for example. While the central characters of Tadashi (wonderfully played by Charles Watson), his two adopted sisters, Chikako (Funie Hsu) and Matsuko (Mindy Ngoc Diep) and his adopted father Vincent (Bill Ritch) are clearly listed, there is nothing to let the audience know that the character referred to in the play as “Mama-chama” (a powerful portrayal by Linda Renter) was actually listed in the program as “Shapeshifter- confuser” or that “Shapeshifter-dazzler” referred to two different characters portrayed by Antonia McCabe. Tadashi’s mother, Satomi (Mitzie Abe) is never referred to by name in the play, and only by process of elimination do we know that the three characters called “Kuro-ko” are the men who have minor roles, but there is no indication of which is Michael Yap, Joel Rentner, or Jessie Left. Eting, Jr. It would have been helpful to have an explanation for the character names.

The timeline is also somewhat problematic. Director Shannon states, “The story is never told in linear fashion. Always the spirit world and the earth world interact. Tadashi goes back and forth in time between 1940 and 2000.” While it is sometimes easy to follow Tadashi’s thought process in switching from present to past, the shifts are not always intuitive and guideposts for the audience in the program would have been helpful.

While Peggy Shannon has given us a visually appealing production which moves smoothly, the script itself makes the story difficult to follow, by presenting scenes in a seemingly haphazard fashion, leaving the audience confused as to what the precise timeline of the action actually is, and struggling to fit together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the information to arrive at a logical conclusion.

Scenic Designer Michael Smith has created a simple but eloquent set, with shoji screens at the back of the stage, a huge translucent moon through which the characters in Tadashi’s past speak to him from an elevated platform, and simple blocks moved about the stage when needed.

David Zyla’s costumes, particularly the traditional Japanese kimonos, were beautiful. Since much of the play deals with issues of race and entity and layers of identity within race, several characters wear masks, which work quite effectively. Particularly poignant is Tadashi’s father, played by a white actor wearing a black mask, who, late in life, describes his war experience by saying, “I killed people for my country, then came home and my country called me a nigger.”

The lighting design of Lawrence Metzler helped identify the various flashbacks in a coherent fashion bit could not overcome the basic structural difficulties of the script itself.

By the year 2010, the American majority will be a mixture of races, cultures, ethnicities. As America shifts and evolves, culture clash occurs. Hasu Houston addresses this situation head-on in “Waiting for Tadashi,” hoping to help us understand each other better as Americans, and as human beings. Sometimes the examination is painful, sometimes it is comical. Unfortunately, in this play the structure prevents the playwright from hitting the mark squarely.

This show contains language and addresses subject matter that may be inappropriate or frightening for young children.

“Waiting for Tadashi continues November 2-5 at Wyatt Pavillion. Tickets are available by calling (530) 752-1915 or faxing (530) 752-7117.

Stars: 3