The Palacio Podcast
Playwright Velina Hasu Houston: Each Encounter in Life Happens only Once
Velina Hasu Houston is Distinguished Professor and Resident Playwright at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Dramatic Arts. On her website, there is a Zen saying, Ichigo Ichie, roughly translated as “Each encounter in life happens only once.” It is a saying that Ms. Houston carries into her everyday life and her writing.
“For my everyday life, I feel, that every time you meet a person, you may never meet them again. So, I take that very literally you may want to make the exchange meaningful so you have to be genuine and hopefully, they’re being genuine too.”
According to Ms. Houston, you must be aware that when you meet another human being, you have an opportunity to stop and discover them.
“…you have to be aware that you’re not just talking to a human being, it’s not just the mailman or this person at the grocery store. Whatever is important to them, this may be the only opportunity to understand that.”
Velina Hasu Houston
The youngest of three, Velina Hasu Houston was born in international waters on a military ship. Her father, Lemo Houston, was African-American/Native-American originally from Linden, Alabama. Her mother, Setsuko Takechi, is originally from Matsuyama, Ehime, a provincial town in Shikoku Island. The author of countless plays and operas, Velina Hasu Houston carries Ichigo Ichie along into her writing life.
“As I become interested in ideas, character stories that whatever I’m feeling about them, I take note of it.”
Houston maintains a number of journals where she writes down thoughts, images, everything that will help her remember her encounter with an idea or a story character.
“I open the journal and I relive that experience because that was the moment of capture. That was the moment of connection.”
I met Velina Hasu Houston through my wife, Sumire, and her sister, Linda, who are both half-black, half-Japanese. Their father was also an American serviceman who married a Japanese woman after World War Two and ended up in Compton, California. Ms. Houston’s story is similar except she was raised in raised in Junction City, Kansas. We sat down with the USC Distinguished Professor and Resident Playwright for an extended interview about the importance of identity in her writing and teaching the next generation of playwrights.
The Plays of Velina Hasu Houston (A partial list)
TEA: Four women come together to clean the house of a fifth after her tragic suicide upsets the balance of life in small Japanese Immigrant community in the middle of the Kansas heartland. The spirit of the dead woman as a ghostly ringmaster to force the women to come to terms with the disquieting tension of their lives and find common ground so she can escape from the limbo between life and death, and move on to the next world in peace- and indeed carve a pathway for their future passage.
CALLIGRAPHY: Two generations of women in one family – two cousins and their mothers, who are sisters – struggle to navigate change as they confront their mothers’ aging and the impact it has on their lives. In Los Angeles, Hiromi, an Afro-Japanese -Latina artist, must learn to cope with the advent of Alzheimer’s disease, and its impact on their relationship and their very lives. In Tokyo, eccentric and contemporary Sayuri must face the challenges of her mother Natusoko’s physical impairment. At odds in both situations is the family history Noriko marrying a black man and emigrating to the U.S., a history that still leaves a bad taste in Natusoko’s mouth.
KENSINGTON: How the hell does one survive in a country you weren’t born in? In the U.S. and U.K., two female immigrants from Japan figure it out in different ways. Yoshimi, a poor student in Los Angeles, and her older sister Mai, an affluent diplomat’s wife in London, reunite after a ten-year estrangement. Yoshimi comes to rekindle sisterhood while Mai comes to end it once and for all.
More on the biography and plays of Velina Hasu Houston HERE.
