NEW YORK -- From a New Yorker's point of view, young Japanese actor Masayasu Nakanishi definitely has chutzpah. How many other people would go out of their way to flash their dreams and frustrations in public, especially when the defeats equal or outnumber the successes?
From today, Nakanishi is renting a theater a few steps from the Great White Way to reveal all in his one-man show, "Japa-Rica." His performance is by intent autobiographical, but it can be seen as much more: a case study on ESL acquisition, culture shock and re-entry acclimation; a street-scam orientation for new arrivals; or even shameless self-advertisement. Slice it any way and each revealed surface differs from the last. But above all, "Japa-Rica" is one man's story of his American Dream.
Nakanishi -- called Bobby by his Japanese friends, Masa by his American friends -- planned the production, with script help and direction from Robert Baumgardner, to mark 10 years of study and work as a Japanese actor in America. The show is subtitled "A Crash Course in Being American," and, indeed, Nakanishi has graduated from the school of hard knocks. He gets repeatedly dumped by women, is misunderstood at McDonald's and gets more reprimands than tips when he takes a job as a waiter in a Japanese restaurant. Success, even when it comes, is never total.