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Dear Miss Breed (play)

Plays
Grades 3-5, Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12
Communication – verbal and nonverbal, Evils of racism, Growing up – pain or pleasure
No availability

Play about a San Diego librarian who corresponded with incarcerated Japanese American children during World War II. Playwright Joanne Oppenheim adapted Dear Miss Breed from her children's book Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference .

Dust Storm (play)

Plays

One-person play by Rick Foster inspired by the beating of Issei artist Chiura Obata at Topaz in 1943. Originally produced for Duende, a nonprofit that develops plays about history for schools, Dust Storm was most recently produced in 2013 by Colorado's Theatre Esprit Asia (TEA).

E.O. 9066 (play)

Plays

Play that tells the story of one family's wartime incarceration through puppets made out of ordinary objects. Performed by the San Francisco Bay area based "object theatre company" Lunatique Fantastique, which was founded by Liebe Wetzel, E.O. 9066 tells its story nearly silently, with objects such a tea set, table cloth, and old suitcase brought to life by company members, dubbed "manipulators." Debuting in 2003, the show was performed at several venues in the Bay Area over the next few years as well as in Utah in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Topaz , where the play is set. [1]

Gila River (play)

Plays

Play by Lane Nishikawa, set in the Gila River , Arizona, concentration camp, that tells the story of the Wakabayashi family. Told in a flashback after Nisei daughter Mitsue revisits the site in 1972, the play incorporates the arrest and internment of the Issei patriarch, the military service (in the Military Intelligence Service ) of a baseball loving son, and relationships with Native Americans on whose land the camp had been built. The play premiered in 1999 at the Gila River Arts and Crafts Center and has been subsequently performed at the World Theater at California State University at Monterey Bay and the Japan America Theatre in Los Angeles.

The Gate of Heaven (play)

Plays

Play by Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge about the lifelong friendship between a Nisei who helped liberate a Nazi death camp as a member of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion and a Holocaust survivor. The main characters, Kiyoshi "Sam" Yamamoto and Leon Ehrlich, are based on the lives of the playwrights' fathers. The play begins in April 1945 and follows the two men over the course of their lives. It was first produced at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego on March 5, 1996. Nishikawa adapted the play into a short dramatic film titled When We Were Warriors, Part I , which he directed and starred in alongside Talmadge.

Gold Watch (play)

Plays

A 1972 play by Momoko Iko that was one of the first to take up the wartime mass removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

Heart Mountain (play)

Plays

Play first produced in 2012 that tells the story of a Japanese American family from Venice, California, and their wartime removal and incarceration at Heart Mountain . The play was conceived and commissioned by Perviz Sawoski, the chair of the Theater Arts Department at Santa Monica City College in Southern California and written by G. Bruce Smith, the school's public information officer and a playwright of over twenty plays. The dramatic play incorporates archival images and dance inspired by Butoh. First produced at the college in November 2012, the play was also selected to be performed at the Kenney Center American College Theater Festival, Region VIII at the Los Angeles Theater Center in February 2013.

Hold These Truths (play)

Plays

One-person play by Jeanne Sakata centering on Gordon Hirabayashi 's challenge of World War II measures against Japanese Americans. Debuting at East West Players in Los Angeles in 2007 under the title Dawn's Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi , the ninety-minute play enjoyed a second major production in New York in 2012 as Hold These Truths .

The Heart No Longer Silent (play)

Plays
Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Quest for discovery, Power of the past, Evils of racism, Will to survive
No availability

Storytelling performance with digital imagery by storyteller Megumi and artist Elaine Sayoko Yoneoka. Funded by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program , The Heart No Longer Silent: Stories with Images from the Japanese American Internment of World War II was performed several times in Central and Northern California in 2002.

Harry Kelly (play)

Plays

Two-act play by Harold Heifetz set during World War II that dramatizes the romance between Hanako, a young Japanese American outcast woman in a concentration camp who has just lost her parents, and Anyay, a Native American man living in the neighboring "Mojave Indian Reservation." As the play begins, the stage is literally divided down the middle by a barbed wire fence separating the two worlds. The play juxtaposes the romance with the conflicts over the institution of the loyalty questionnaire . Harry Kelly debuted at East West Players (EWP) in Los Angeles on April 4, 1974, in a production directed by Mako . With the support of the California Arts Council, EWP toured the play to various community institutions in California in 1976–77. [1]

12-1-A (play)

Plays
Available

A play by Wakako Yamauchi that was first produced in 1982. Set in the concentration camp in Poston , Arizona—the same camp the author was incarcerated in—from May 1942 to July 1943, the play follows several Japanese American families at Poston as their characters grapple with the loyalty questionnaire , military service, and possible resettlement . The title of the play refers to the camp address of the Tanaka family, block 12, barracks 1, unit A. Yamauchi wrote the play while the Rockefeller Playwright in Residence at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. It premiered on March 11, 1982, at East West Players in Los Angeles, the third of four plays in their "Internment Camp Series". Subsequent productions include Asian American Theater Co, San Francisco (1982); Kumu Kahua Theatre, Honolulu (1990); University of California, Los Angeles (1992); and California State University, Los Angeles (2012).

Rohwer (play)

Plays

Play by Lionelle Hamanaka that premiered in March 1982, as part of the New York based Pan Asian Repertory Theatre's 1981–82 season dedicated to plays on the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The story follows a Japanese American family's incarceration odyssey at the Arkansas concentration camp , focusing on the family patriarch as his traditional authority is stripped away by his prior internment and camp dynamics. The playwright, a native of New York born after the war, learned about her family's incarceration experience in junior high school. The play ran from March 12 to March 21, 1982. The two other plays in the Pan Asian Repertory series were Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro's Behind Enemy Lines and Richard France's Station J .

A Question of Loyalty/The Betrayed (play)

Plays
Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Fiction
Limited availability

Play authored by Nisei playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi set in Tule Lake and centered on the dilemmas brought on by the loyalty questionnaire . The main characters are Tak Fujimoto, a country boy loosely based on the playwright, and Grace Tamura, a sophisticated city girl from Seattle, who fall in love in the concentration camp. But they are divided by the loyalty questions and go their separate ways. The play's second act is set forty years later, when Grace, a widowed redress activist from Chicago, visits Tak, a divorced farmer in Fresno, prior to a camp reunion.

Question 27, Question 28 (play)

Plays

Two-act documentary play by Chay Yew that was first produced in 2004. The play tells the story of the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast and its aftermath through the voices of a variety of Japanese American and non-Japanese American women. All of the play's lines come from "interviews, transcripts and testimonials" by women who lived through that experience. The cast includes four characters, three Asian and one Caucasian, who read the lines, with the real life figure from whose testimony they come from first identified. Among the many women whose words are used are Yuri Kochiyama , Monica Sone , Mary Tsukamoto , Yoshiko Uchida , and many others, including some non-Japanese Americans such as teacher Eleanor Gerard Sekerak and Eleanor Roosevelt . The title of the play comes from two contentious questions on the so-called loyalty questionnaire administered to the Japanese American detainees …

Station J (play)

Plays

Epic three-hour play by Richard France on the wartime exclusion, incarceration, and return of the Shigeta family told in three acts, each consisting of six scenes and a prologue and a epilogue. The play was part of the 1981–82 seasons of both East West Players in Los Angeles and the Pan Asian Repertory Theater in New York; both Asian American theater companies devoted that season to plays on the Japanese American World War II incarceration.

Unvanquished (play)

Plays

Play by Holly Yasui based on the wartime experiences of her father, Minoru Yasui . The play had its first workshop production in August and September of 1990 at the Annex Theater in Seattle. In July of 1991, it was selected as one of two plays to be workshopped as part of Seattle's Multicultural Playwrights Festival.

Valley of the Heart (play)

Plays
Grades 9-12, Adult
Drama, History
Change versus tradition, Everlasting love, Family – blessing or curse, Love and sacrifice, Patriotism – positive side or complications

Play by Luis Valdez centered on two farm families—one Japanese American and one Mexican American—in Cupertino, California, during World War II.

Uncle Gunjiro's Girlfriend (play)

Plays
Grades 9-12, Adult
Evils of racism, Power of the past, Reunion, Role of Religion – virtue or hypocrisy
Limited availability

Performance piece that incorporates storytelling, music, dance, and multimedia elements to expose the secret of Brenda Wong Aoki's family: her great-uncle's marriage to a white woman and the subsequent split in the family.

Tondemonai-Never Happen! (play)

Plays

Tondemonai—Never Happen! , a two-act play written and directed by Soon-Tek Oh (then referred to as Soon-Taik Oh) that premiered in Los Angeles in 1970, is a theatrical drama that portrays the experience of Koji Murayama, a Nisei who experiences flashbacks to his traumatic wartime experience in the Manzanar camp. Tondemonai is notable not only as the first professionally-staged theatrical work to center on the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans, but for its forward-looking discussion of race and sexuality.

What We Could Carry (play)

Plays

One-woman show developed by Nikiko Masumoto, based on the testimony of thirteen people from the Los Angeles hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1981. Masumoto developed the 45-minute piece as part of her graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. In 2013, she performed the piece at two Days of Remembrance in California and in various other venues throughout the state. A Yonsei and fourth generation farmer, playwright Masumoto works at her family's organic farm and is the daughter of acclaimed writer and farmer David Mas Masumoto .

Within the Silence (play)

Plays

Solo multimedia piece that tells the story of one family's wartime incarceration experience. Within the Silence was written by Ken Mochizuki in 1998 and produced by Living Voices, a Seattle-based educational theater company that specializes in solo performances that dramatize important historical events aimed at secondary school college audiences. Within the Silence has been performed over 4,000 times in sixteen states by numerous actors before over 200,000 audience members in schools, corporations, libraries, museums, and other venues across the country. A teacher's guide and bibliography to accompany the piece are available through the Living Voices website.

The Ancestors' Box (play)

Plays

Play for children by Christina Hamlett that takes place during and after World War II and explores the wartime expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans. The play centers on Japanese American teenager Amy Sasaki, who is sent to an unspecified American concentration camp with her family, and her best friend Lily Danvers, a white teenager who stays behind. The play's scenes take play just prior to the Sasakis leaving for camp from their home in Anaheim, California, in 1942, upon their return in 1945, and in 2000. The estimated length of a performance is 35 minutes.

Baseball Saved Us (play)

Plays

Musical play for children based on the popular children's book of the same name. Produced by Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre as part of its Adventure Musical Theater Touring Company in 2003, the play went to schools throughout Washington state. Ken Mochizuki, who also authored the children's book, Baseball Saved Us , wrote the script for the play, and Bruce Monroe wrote the music and lyrics. The approximately forty-five minute play tells the story of one family's wartime incarceration and how building a baseball field in camp provided an escape for the imprisoned population.

Behind Enemy Lines (play)

Plays

Play by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro that tells the story of the Toda family and the travails brought on by their expulsion and incarceration in " assembly center " horse stalls and concentration camp barracks. The loyalty questionnaire splits the family, with one son joining the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and another ending up a renunciant . The play was had its first reading in 1980 and was produced by the Peoples Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1981 and the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York in March of 1982 as part a series of three plays about the Japanese American incarceration. [1]

Bronzeville (play)

Plays

Play by Tim Toyama and Aaron Woolfolk about an African American family moving into Bronzeville —the abandoned Little Tokyo in Los Angeles—during World War II and encountering a Japanese American in hiding.

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