Customer Reviews

The Teahouse of the August Moon.

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It is a play adapted from the novel with the same title. It is witty and easy to read. The characters are hilarious and fun. After World War II Okinawa in Japan was occupied by U.S. Forces. This play is about how the American forces tried to turn the "savage" and "uncivilized" Japanese citizens into "intelligent" and "civilized" people. An under experienced officer is sent to a small village to authorize the building of a school and the forming of a democratic society in the village. Instead of changing the villagers he is changed.

This book is both a wonderfully funny story of the post World War II Occupation of Okinawa and its redevelopment and a handbook for sustainable development. This book, together with The Ugly American, should be required reading for everyone working in development

I thought I ordered the famous novel but instead received the script of the play. I am very disappointed.

The nomenclature of the ad was misleading.

Based on the 1951 novel by Vern Sneider, the 1953 play THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON by John Patrick was an extremely successful Broadway ticket, running a thousand performances over three years and winning three Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is still amusing--but time has not been entirely kind, and in more recent years it has been accused of racial stereotyping and insensitivity.

The play concerns army Capt. Fisby, a ne'er-do-well who is posted to Okinawa after World War II and assigned to teach American values to the small village of Tobeki. Among his projects are the building of a school (pentagon shaped, of course), the creation of a Ladies Democratic League, and through such venues teaching the people about capitalism. Unfortunately, Fisby soon finds himself awash in a series of misunderstandings and manipulations, many of them courtesy of the play's narrator Sakini, who looks upon the Americans as just one more name in a long line of invaders to be ignored as much as possible. It happens that Fisby receives a Geisha as a gift: Lotus Blossom, a beauty who seduces him into going native but who sows dischord among the villagers. In order to placate them, Fisby postpones building the school and uses the supplies to build a teahouse instead, where Lotus Blossom can both teach the art of a Geisha to the local women and entertain male clients as well. But the villagers realize they must sell a product to have money to spend at the tea house--and so, after a series of mis-steps, take up the manufacture of brandy, something that eventually brings the wrath of army brass down upon Fisby and the village as a whole. Needless to say, the villagers outsmart both Fisby and his commanders in an amusing sort of way.

It is true that many of the Asian characters are stereotypical, but these stereotypes are not mean-spirited and if anything the Asian characters emerge as more wise than their American occupiers. Even so, there are several significant problems with the show, not the least of which is that many of the Asian characters were originally played by Occidental actors (David Wayne played Sakini in the Broadway production and Marlon Brando played the role in a later film version.) In the 1950s this was still acceptable, but a decade later it be seen as significantly inappropriate, and the play carries a certain stigma on the point to this day. The play is also inaccurate in terms of language, for the Okinawans speak Japanese in the play, when in fact Okinawans have their own and significantly different language. But perhaps the single biggest strike against the play is that many of its jokes were topical and related to World War II, and modern audiences are quite likely to miss many of the laughs entirely.

Even so, THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON is a graceful, extremely colorful, and often charming play and many of its failures may be ascribed to the fact that it was written in a more innocent era. Recommended, but in this day and age it is probably best left on the page instead of played on the stage.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

In Memory of Art Steinaway, a Gentleman

This looks like its the novel. but when you actually get the book, you'll see it's just a play. Quite annoying. The description of the "item" is misleading.