A RECENTLY REVITALIZED Asian American Theater Company, with its first full season underway in years, presents the world premiere of a play by longtime AATC stalwart Philip Kan Gotanda. In the wake of last November's success with Fist of Roses at Intersection for the Arts, Gotanda's Under the Rainbow, a set of two 50-minute one-acts he also directs, comes as a less even but equally welcome surprise.

Natalie Wood Is Dead delves into the relationship between a Japanese American mother and daughter with mutual careers in the acting mill of greater Hollywood. Natalie Hayashi (Pearl Wong) has drifted away from the acting work her actor-mother, Yoko Dalhauser (Diane Takei), had managed for her. Now after two years apart, Yoko, a self-described "winner," greets her 33-year-old jet-lagged daughter with a carpe diem attitude and an onslaught of unbidden advice. Natalie, reserved and slightly ironic, endures Yoko's pestering about her looks and career, even her mother's proud unveiling of her new bustline. But she balks at Yoko's obsession with self-improvement ("Why are you learning French?" Natalie asks. "You never know," her mother responds), which flourishes in an entirely material dimension. It's the kind of thing she's been foisting on Natalie since childhood (beginning with her name, a marketing ploy of her mother's meant as the Japanese equivalent of Natalie Wood).

Yoko's rebuttals to Natalie's critique of her runaway materialism and science-driven body fetishism come over as humorously inept, but then Yoko really sees no need to defend the latest Botoxed wrinkle in the unfolding American dream. "What's wrong with making people beautiful, happy, smart, rich, and with nice feet?" she asks rhetorically. "I'll take it.... Bring it on; bring on the science." Instead, Yoko's quick to blame Natalie for letting "political nitwits" get to her about the stereotyped parts she's played – "quitting" is an unacceptable act in Yoko's philosophy. (In a nice irony, Yoko's early schlock-movie roles get touted in an academic journal as trailblazing icons of the independent self-empowered Asian female.)

And yet Yoko's shameless embrace of Hollywood-style self-improvement is only the hedonistic expression of a desperate competition between racialized bodies, prancing appetizingly before the maw of American success. It's a game that has devastated Natalie. Having no bounds, it has overrun every corner of ground on which she might have built her own inviolable identity. She stares in fascination and muted horror at her mother's ability to meet the demand to do "anything" to win, aware that by doing so, Yoko the survivor has played handmaiden to a system of racial and sexual exploitation that has left Natalie without a sense of self – a system ominously personified in Natalie's thoughts by a white man (Danny Wolohan) with a proposition. The self-made Yoko has constructed her daughter as well, and it's a nonperson her daughter has grown to hate. If Natalie Wood is dead, Natalie Hayashi was stillborn. Ultimately, Yoko's daughter must give birth to herself, like Ibsen's Nora, outside the very structure of family life. Maybe Natalie would, but Yoko's daughter no longer has to.

Gotanda's dialogue, peppered with humor and growing unease, flows from parental hectoring and filial evasions to reminiscences before the VCR, and finally to a moment of fatal truth-telling. Opening night found the timing initially uneven between Takei and Wong. By the play's climax, however, they had locked into a chilling confrontation, as Gotanda's essentially political theme worked its way through a small but compelling family drama.

The second play, White Manifesto and Other Perfumed Tales of Self-Entitlement, or, Got Rice?, bears a tangential relation to the first, hinted at in some overlapping dialogue and the return of the white male from inside Natalie's thoughts. But it's in an entirely different mode. It's a hilarious, scathing, nonstop joyride, flawlessly executed by Wolohan, who faces the audience in the manner of an inspirational speaker addressing white heterosexual males with a penchant for dating Asian American women. Here the privileged, normative, omnipresent white male "gaze" just up and speaks ("I'm talking white-guy truth"), on everything from the art of the pickup line to the sociology of interracial attraction and the psychology of power. This "post-P.C." how-to by a self-titled WMWA (white male with attitude) recalls Tom Cruise in Magnolia and Neil LaBute's brutes in In the Company of Men. At the same time, flanked by two Asian American models (Wong again, and Suz Takeda) sporting visual aids and a deceptively vacuous demeanor, his disjointed seminar distorts with brief waking nightmares of brutality and apocalypse that trouble the otherwise effortless sleepwalk of "the natural," the guy "who fits in and who moves through the world as if it were tailor-made for him." In representing the white heterosexual male back to himself – not entirely unsympathetically – Gotanda rattles the racist foundations of first-world privilege with shrewd, roiling humor.

Gotanda is capable of treading in almost any aesthetic direction, yet his work always has an immediacy born of a strong intuitive grasp of the emotional and psychological life of individuals. His facility with the political and cultural discourse around Asian American identity informs but never overwhelms his sure sense of dramatic possibility. He's not only a versatile stylist with an enviable ear for dialogue and a buoyant sense of humor (at turns all-embracing and scouring), but he's also a playwright who unflinchingly goes wherever the play demands. 'Under the Rainbow' runs Thurs/10, 8 p.m.; Fri/11-Sat/12, 7 and 9 p.m., Off-Market Theater, 965 Mission, S.F. $25. (415) 896-6477, www.cafearts.com.