Getting Your Kicks
By Jordan Ikeda
Arts and Entertainment Editor
Friday, Sept. 19, 2008

EWP does it again with a poignant look at family mixed with gung fu in “Be Like Water.”

Clockwise from left, Shawn Huang as Bruce Lee; Michael Sun Lee as Frank; Pam Hayashida as Kimiko; Ariel Rivera as Tina; and Saya Tomioka as Tracy.

Tomioka, as Tracy, spars with the ghost of Bruce Lee (Cesar Cipriano).

Cipriano as Bruce Lee’s ghost wielding nunchucks.

Let’s see. How to top a production that blends hip-hop, anime, and feudal Japan in a reinvention of a classic story splashed with electric color and a hint of eroticism? Simple...
Disco ninjas.
Add to that the ghost of Bruce Lee, Queen and the Bee Gees. 
If you’re not even the least bit curious, check your foot for a tag. 
East West Players delivers once again as its newest stage production, “Be Like Water,” directed by Chris Tashima, opened Wednesday evening with a knockout kick that would leave any sefu beaming with pride. 
At the heart of this production, as with any that aspires to true excellence, is the writing. Dan Kwong has penned a powerful, emotive, yet at times playful tale that follows Tracy (played wonderfully by Saya Tomioka), a young teenage girl who is a lover of all things gung fu.
Tracy sports Bruce Lee clothes, sleeps on Bruce Lee pillowcases, carries nunchucks around the house and practices martial arts in her spare time.
Tracy’s fetish fringes on kitsch, her obsession creating an almost plastic, market-ready figure of arguably the greatest, most influential martial artist of our time.
It isn’t until she begins to use her fighting as a way of expressing herself, manifested in her beat down of a white bully at her school, that the ghost of Bruce Lee appears to her.
Tomioka plays the part of the frustrated, socially awkward Tracy spot on. Able to show a wide range of emotion both in her voice and in her facial expressions as well as display athletic feats of martial arts and dance, it is impossible to tell that this was the 14-year-old Tomioka’s first ever theatre production.
As a way of both conveying the spiritual world as well as representing a physical example of his ideas, Bruce Lee connects with Tracy through the conduit of water. He appears via a drinking glass, a fish bowl, and the laundry machine.
Cesar Cipriano (“Pippin,” “Sweeney Todd”) stars as the ghost of Bruce Lee. He looks the part (at several times so much so it’s uncanny). He sounds the part (the accent and the 70s lingo truly embody Bruce Lee’s spirit). Cipriano even moves like him. There is plenty of action. The ghost of Bruce Lee fights ninjas while classic bands like the Bee Gees and Queen blast on in the background.  
The power is not in the fist, however. It is rather in the words that Bruce Lee imparts to his adopted student.
“Be like water making its way through cracks,” he tells Tracy. “Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it.”
The whole play moves and breathes as if alive. One action ripples into the rest of the action that causes a variety of outcomes that transform from a distant view of the problems of the characters on stage to an all-too familiar, uncomfortably close-to-home, examination of ourselves. 
There is marital tension thicker than Los Angeles smog between Tracy’s parents, Kimiko (Pam Hayashida) and Frank (Michael Sun Lee), as each wrestles with his/her own demons of acceptance as well as their polar differences concerning life and raising a child.
Their struggles to communicate with each other reverberate to their interaction with their daughter. Kimiko wants Tracy to be a girl, to wear dresses and be excited about dance. Frank lets his daughter be who she wants to, but lacks ideal discipline to help direct her path.
Tracy struggles to find acceptance of who she is from the other kids at school, except for her friend, also named Bruce Lee. He’s a “nerd” who loves dancing a la Saturday Night Fever-style. Shawn Huang, who plays Bruce, dressed like the Travolta everyone knew from his pre-”Pulp Fiction” days, works on overdrive to steal every scene he dances on to.
As outsiders, the friends struggle to deal with the other kids at school. Ariel Rivera plays Kimiko, an Asian American princess who picks on both Tracy and Bruce. Jonathan Decker plays the white bully, Jeremy. They round out the rest of the cast, who, despite being only seven strong, really pack a punch in their acting, er, chops. 
The action and fighting scenes are top notch (choreographed by Lee’s god-daughter, Diana Lee Inosanto) and the dancing (choreographed by Blythe Matsui) will give any 60’s baby a colorful flashback to their youth.
Digging further though, I couldn’t help but think back on Lee’s greatest accomplishment, the one he unfortunately wasn’t able to see to fruition.  “Enter the Dragon.”
In that movie, the audience is given a visual kaleidoscope of Lee doppelgangers in the final battle that takes place amongst a room full of mirrors. Lee carefully makes his way through those mirrors, seeing his own reflections moving together as one, but all showing different angles—different sides.
Shrouded in subtlety, “Be Like Water” does the same.
We understand the kicks and the punches and the rippled body, yet can’t comprehend or simply overlook the poetic philosophy. We’ve all been amazed by the gung fu, though we might snicker at the notion of the cha cha cha. We worship and cheer for the action hero, but often forget the husband, the loving father.  
To Frank, Bruce Lee is the epitome of the Asian hero. To Kimiko, he is the reason behind her daughter’s lack of femininity, a distraction that must be removed. To Tracy’s friend, Bruce Lee, he is the shared name and the reason behind the bully’s taunts. To Tracy, he is sefu.
In the end, all of these ideas of who Bruce Lee is walk together, side-by-side, looking at the myriad faces, seeing the reflections.
He is all of them, and yet none of them.
So, how about those disco ninjas?
Be like water and flow over to EWP to find out.