Can a marriage survive critical reassessment after 40 years?

In "Yohen," by Philip Kan Gotanda, the wife has thrown her husband out of the house, insisting that he begin to "date" her all over again. When he shows up without flowers or candy, he's scolded for his insensitivity.

This promises to be an interesting play, especially when the husband (Jim Andrews) is a retired black American soldier and the wife (Jodie Yamada) is a Japanese war bride. One expects racial and cultural matters to be examined, in addition to marital and character issues.

The title comes from a Japanese ceramics term for a piece that comes out of the kiln in an unintended way. It may be discarded as a rude mistake or appreciated as a thing of beauty. Accordingly, the play's central question is whether this marriage should be saved or discarded.

Both characters are at a turning point. The wife has gone back to school to study and create Japanese ceramics. The husband is resurrecting a boxing career by coaching and mentoring at-risk teenagers.

Unfortunately, the drama never strongly locks on to its possibilities. In four exceedingly talky scenes, the characters spar with each other in slow motion, throwing half-hearted punches that never connect. Ideas are produced without full shape or discernable form.

The production is also marred by director Jason Kanda's choice to allow a glacially slow pace almost untouched by changes in tempo. Many lines of dialogue are broken into phrases interspersed with ponderous pauses and wrung out with excruciating deliberateness.

Pauses are effective in punctuating dialogue when they are filled with physical or psychic action. Something must happen in the pause to shape audience attention to what has just happened or what may happen next. They are negative spaces that help define words and movement.

Unfortunately, the pauses in "Yohen" are simply voids.

Often the wife leaves the husband alone on stage, suspended in a freeze frame without purpose. They exchange dialogue in broken, halting pieces that add no meaningful subtext.

The audience may initially try to fill those pauses by searching for intent, but will give up and bob along with flotsam dialogue on the meandering current of the play.

I filled the spaces by timing them. They range from two to six seconds.

The ultimate effect is that we don't care about these people. They may have followed interesting paths to this turning point in their lives, and their present debate and possible futures could be significant. But neither the playwright nor the production gives their situation enough power to make it work in the theater.

"Yohen" is produced during the dark nights of the regular Kumu Kahua season, so it's a good opportunity to take chances on works that are not yet ready for prime time.

At different points in this play each character finds the other to be boring. The audience, however, should never be faced with that same conclusion.