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“The Wind Cries Mary” David Henry Hwang Theater

“Bra burning doesn’t accomplish anything,” quips Eiko Hanabi, the main character in playwright Philip Kan Gotanda’s “The Wind Cries Mary,” playing at East West Players through Feb. 29. “The men get more to ogle and the breasts just sag sooner.”

Eiko, heroine and villainess rolled into one, is a sharp-tongued, Hendrix-fueled, Kurosawa-derived Lady Macbeth on a one-way acid trip to hell – all fire-brand intellectual verbosity and “I am Woman” prancing.

As centerpiece to Gotanda’s laudable Asian American transposition of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” to America at the height of the Vietnam War (students will have a field day noting the parallels), Jodi Long commits to the lead role with a burning intensity that obliterates awkward and badly timed physical choices. It’s an almost one-note performance, but the script mercifully allows her a few quiet moments in which she returns and fleetingly touches the depths of her otherwise inscrutable character. In these too few moments most of all, Long is absolutely riveting.

East West stalwart Sab Shimono memorably plays the scheming Dr. Nakada, convincing in his self-affirming amorality, quipping that he is “after all a Professor of Business.” Kelvin Han Yee, as the maverick visionary, “yellow power” activist and self-destructive genius, was forceful and vocally commanding, like Eiko, the voice-piece of the play’s important discourse on the Asian American experience.

Pity then that Gotanda’s otherwise well-written play, in director Lisa Peterson’s hands, goes the way of the burning bra (and the way of the burning hash). There is plenty of enigmatic staginess to ogle, including an admittedly stunning coup de theater of a closer, but nothing of true permanence to savor in the dying embers of a sagging story arc that seems to want to go from here to eternity in five seconds flat.

“The Wind Cries Mary” is an important character-driven piece begging to be unveiled layer by layer. The writing is worthy of trust. But Peterson’s direction anticipates its wordless resolution in its hurry to deliver the final payoff (masterful as that is).

The production also relies far too much on its symbolically stylized yin-yang set, complete with ’60s mod furniture and the jarring, gimmicky use of its overdone ’60s soundtrack. By the umpteenth time, the choice of having the actors move off to stage right and physically put on a vinyl record each time a song was called for felt as tired and as worn as the grooves on those old records.

“The Wind Cries Mary” desperately tries to soar, but ultimately gets mired in Peterson’s efforts, deliberate or otherwise, to make ’60s psychedelia the star of the show.

–Alex Wen