International City Theatre delivers a modernized goddess

For a play that begins with a flitting dream-sequence dance between a lovesick Japanese schoolgirl in traditional kimono and a droning Greek love goddess in flowing robes, Calling Aphrodite is surprisingly down-to-earth, particularly after the atom bomb explodes.

Velina Hasu Houston’s new drama is inspired by the cruel irony of the Hiroshima Maidens, women who were partially melted by the United States’ 1945 nuclear attack on their city, then 10 years later brought to America for reconstructive surgery they couldn’t receive in decimated Japan. The play is billed as a journey of redemption, forgiveness, love and hope that is told through the evolving relationships among two disfigured sisters and the embittered American plastic surgeon who treats them.

If you can’t bear the horror, go ahead and see it that way. But ascribing a moral to this story—presenting the vaporization of a teeming city as some sort of self-improvement exercise for its survivors—only trivializes it.

In the hands of a lesser playwright than Houston, the significance of Calling Aphrodite might have floated away on puffy clouds of mushy spiritualism and convenient rationalization. A couple of times, it almost does.

But Houston never forgets that the cloud at the center of her play is mushroom-shaped. When basic logic raises a doubt—such as the plastic surgery project seeming like a way for Americans to assuage their guilt for committing war atrocities—Houston senses it, and answers it, often by confirming it. She repeatedly reins in sweeping messages in favor of a simple lesson: the casualties of war, no matter the scale, are always personal and ultimately individual.

This lesson resonated the morning after Calling Aphrodite made its world premiere, when the Associated Press reported that bombings, sectarian slayings and other violence related to war killed 1,809 Iraqi civilians in August.

CALLING APHRODITE INTERNATIONAL CITY THEATRE | LONG BEACH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER | 300 E OCEAN BLVD | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.436.4610 | ICTLONGBEACH.ORG | THURS-SAT 8PM AND SUN 2PM | THROUGH SEPT 23 | $32-42

Tags: atomic bomb, calling aphrodite, hiroshima, international city theatre, Theater