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Tachinoki (play)

Plays

Play by acclaimed playwright Robert Schenkkan based on the life of Sumi Seo, a Nisei who was sixteen when she and her family were forcibly removed from their farm in San Pedro, California, during with World War II and incarcerated at the Santa Anita Assembly Center and the Jerome , Arkansas concentration camp. The play opened in the 1987–88 season of the Ensemble Studio Theater in Hollywood, California and premiered on November 12, 1987. Seo worked closely with Schenkkan and director Heidi Helen Davis in the writing and production of the play. The cast included Diana Tanaka as Seo, Amy Hill and Jim Ishida as her parents, and Darrell Kunitomi as her brother Masa. Director Davis, whose Nisei mother had been incarcerated at Minidoka , described the play as "a combination of Brecht, living newspaper, agitprop, and some dramatic scenes." [1] Playwright Schenkkan later won a Pulitzer Prize for The …

The Camp Dance: The Music and The Memories (play)

Plays

Musical play set in an unidentified Japanese American concentration camp that is centered on the high school dances that took place in the camps as one of the centers of social life for teenagers. The play was written by Soji Kashiwagi and produced by the Grateful Crane ensemble in 2003. Grants from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program supported performances of The Camp Dance in eight California cities in 2004, as well as the production of a soundtrack CD. As part of the show, the cast performs a variety of popular songs from the period. In some shows, Mary Nomura , a popular Nisei singer known as the "Songbird of Manzanar" has performed with the cast. Since its inception, The Camp Dance in its original two-hour version and a fifty-minute version has been performed at a variety of venues and events in California and the West including the 2006 …

Point of Order: Hirabayashi vs. United States (play)

Plays

Dramatic rendering of Gordon Hirabayashi 's challenge of the wartime curfew and exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast by Japanese Canadian playwright R.A. Shiomi. The play debuted at the Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco in 1983. Scenes from a performance of the play appear in Steven Okazaki's documentary film on the wartime legal cases, Unfinished Business (1985). A second play on Hirabayashi, Jeanne Sakata's Hold These Truths , premiered at East West Players in Los Angeles in 2007.

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.

Block 8 (play)

Plays

Two character play set in Topaz by Matthew Ivan Bennett. A production of the Plan-B Theatre Company of Salt Lake City, Utah, Block 8 premiered on February 20, 2009, at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center's Studio Theatre. The play centers on Ken, a twenty-three year old Nisei from San Francisco who had been a student at the University of California at Berkeley prior to being forcibly removed with his family and incarcerated at Topaz, and Ada, a Mormon woman from Salt Lake City with a son fighting the Pacific who becomes the librarian at Topaz. Initially wary of each other, the two form a surrogate mother/son relationship as Ken struggles with the decision on whether or not to enlist.

Christmas in Camp (play)

Plays

Musical play set in a Japanese American concentration camp at Christmastime. Christmas in Camp , by playwright Dom Magwili, was the second play in East West Players' 1981–82 season—entitled "Kidoairaku"—in which all four plays centered on the Japanese American incarceration story. It premiered December 10, 1981. The central character is Hannah Sasaki, a disabled teenage girl in camp, whose letters to an older sister who had escaped camp through " voluntary evacuation " propel the story. Hannah ends up organizing a Christmas show to improve morale in the camp. The show, consisting of popular Christmas songs, is then performed for both the camp and theater audiences.

Citizen 13559 (play)

Plays
Grades 3-5, Grades 7-8

Play for children by Naomi Iizuka, based on the children's book The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559, Mirror Lake Internment Camp by Barry Denenberg. The story focuses on the wartime experiences of twelve-year-old Ben Uchida, whose family is incarcerated at the fictional "Mirror Lake" camp in Wisconsin. After workshop productions at the Kennedy Center and the Mark Taper Forum's Asian Theatre Workshop, the hour-long play premiered in March 2006 as part of the Kennedy Center Family Theater's first season.

Sisters Matsumoto (play)

Plays

Play by acclaimed playwright Philip Kan Gotanda that takes places shortly after the end of World War II and explores the return of three adult sisters to their California farm after their wartime incarceration.

Strands (play)

Plays
Grades 9-12, Adult
Evils of racism, Power of the past
No availability

One-woman show written and performed by D.H. Naomi Quinones that centers on her Japanese Peruvian grandfather's World War II internment story and her discovery of it. Kiichiro Yoshida was a Japanese Peruvian journalist who was one of over 2,000 Japanese Latin Americans interned in the United States during World War II. Separated from his family, he was not allowed to return to Peru at the end of the war and was instead deported to Japan. Quinones tells the story through video, spoken word poetry, and martial arts. Strands was commissioned by the Asian American Theater Company in association with the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center and was funded in part by a grant from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program . The sixty-minute performance premiered at he SomARTS Cultural Center in San Francisco on May 16, 2002.

Santa Anita '42 (play)

Plays

One of the earliest plays to depict the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, playwright Allan Knee's Santa Anita '42 premiered off-Broadway in 1975 and was revived in 1986–87.

Conjunto (play)

Plays

Play by Oliver Mayer that explores interactions between Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino American farmers and farm workers in California during the World War II years. Min Yamada, a reluctant Nisei farmer in Burbank who dreams of city life, is confronted with the prospect of losing his farm when he and all other West Coast Japanese Americans are forcibly removed to inland concentration camps. He decides to sell the farm to his trusted foreman and friend, Genevevo, a Mexican American. He also arranges for his Issei wife, Shoko, to remain behind, disguised as a Mexican laborer. Returning from incarceration three years later, he finds that much has changed.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (play)

Plays

Theatrical adaptation of the best selling novel by Jamie Ford, first produced by the Book-It Repertory Theatre in Seattle in 2012. The play proved very popular with audiences and was extended twice.

Innocent When You Dream (play)

Plays

Play by Ken Narasaki centering on a dying eighty-year old Nisei man and his recollections of the World War II years.

Japanese American Detention Camps: Stories of Strength and Hope (play)

Plays
Grades 7-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Quest for discovery, Power of the past, Evils of racism, Will to survive
Limited availability

Storytelling performance by Megumi in which she tells stories of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans from the perspective of various characters. Based on interviews with Japanese American former inmates, she has been performing Japanese American Detention Camps since 1997.

A Jive Bomber's Christmas (play)

Plays
Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Adult
Grades 9-12, Adult
Musical
Importance of community, Optimism - power or folly
Widely available

Musical play set in a World War II concentration camp by Saachiko and Dom Magwili. First produced for the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in 1994, A Jive Bomber's Christmas became a holiday tradition in Los Angeles, enjoying a nine-year run and subsequent revivals in Los Angeles and in Hawai'i. The play was based in part on Saachiko Magwili's childhood memories of Heart Mountain and shares a structural similarity with Dom Magwili's earlier Christmas in Camp , first produced at East West Players in 1981.

Justice at War (play)

Plays

Play based on the Mitsuye Endo case developed by Theatre Espresso for performance in schools. A short play that takes place in the courtroom, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese Internment Camps is a fictionalized version of Endo Supreme Court case, including as characters former head of the Western Defense Command General John DeWitt , one of the main architects of the forced exclusion of Japanese Americans; Endo's lawyer James Purcell ; Solicitor General Charles Fahy , who prosecuted the case for the government; Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone; and Mitsuye Endo. (In the actual Endo case, neither DeWitt, who had by then been replaced as head of the Western Defense Command, nor Endo herself, appeared before the court.) The student audience plays the role of the judges and is asked to decide the questions posed by the case.

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