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51 articles
Laughter and False Teeth (play)
- Plays
One-act play by Hiroshi Kashiwagi first produced in 1954 that is likely the first produced play set in the Japanese American concentration camps. The play was revived years later by Asian American theater companies in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Letters to Eve (play)
- Plays
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Expression through art, Facing darkness, Love and sacrifice, War – glory, necessity, pain, tragedy
- No availability
Musical play that juxtaposes the experiences of a Japanese American family in Manzanar with that of an African American musician and his Jewish girlfriend held in captivity in a Nazi prison camp.
Little Women (A Multicultural Transposition) (play)
- Plays
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Coming of age, Desire to escape, Family – blessing or curse, Female roles, Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice
- No availability
Play by Velina Hasu Houston that reimagines Louisa May Alcott's 19th century novel Little Women , setting it in early postwar Los Angeles with four Japanese American sisters at its center.
Manzanar: Story of an American Family (play)
- Plays
Musical play centering on the experiences of the Shimada family, following them from their San Pedro, California, home to the Santa Anita Assembly Center and to Manzanar , told through the eyes of twelve-year-old protagonist Margaret. The play was co-written by Dan Taguchi and Rus McCoy and loosely based on the experiences of Taguchi's mother, who was a child at Manzanar. Various versions of the play have been featured in readings and performances since 2002, but there has been no full production of the play to date.
Miss Minidoka 1943 (play)
- Plays
Two-act musical comedy play set in Minidoka that follows the preparations for a camp beauty contest. The play's timeline parallels that of an actual beauty contest at the camp in January and February 1943, a time that also saw the loyalty questionnaire and the call for volunteers for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team . The book for the play was written by Seattle attorney Gary Iwamoto, with music and lyrics contributed by Iwamoto along with Richard Lewis, Lisa Pan, Erin Flory, Diane Wong, Ken Kubota, Stan Asis, Masaye Okano Nakagawa, and Brian Higham.
Nihonjin Face (play)
- Plays
- Grades 3-5, Grades 7-8
- Circle of life, Evils of racism, Progress – real or illusion, Wisdom of experience
- Widely available
Short play for school audiences by Janet Hayakawa and Tere Martínez that juxtaposes the Japanese American incarceration with the Civil Rights Movement and anti-immigrant sentiment in the present.
The Nisei Monologues: Children of the Camps (play)
- Plays
- Grades 9-12
- Grades 9-12
- Displacement, Evils of racism, Hazards of passing judgment, Injustice, Patriotism – positive side or complications
- No availability
Three actor play in which the actors give monologues adapted from actual words of Japanese Americans about incarceration, covering the range of the experience from witnessing Japanese planes flying overhead to attack Pearl Harbor, to the arrests of Issei community leaders, the roundup of Japanese Americans, and resistance and cooperation in the concentration camps. Though most pieces are not attributed, first person narratives by Min Yasui , James Sakamoto , and Joe Kurihara are noted. In between the monologues are stories from Japanese mythology and statements by various government officials both in support of and opposing the forced removal and incarceration.
No-No Boy (play)
- Plays
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Convention and rebellion, Family – blessing or curse, Heroism – real and perceived, Individual versus society, Role of men
- No availability
2010 play by Ken Narasaki based on John Okada's classic 1957 novel . While the play largely followed the plot of the novel, the decision to change the ending to a "happy" one proved controversial.
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 .
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]
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.
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 …
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 .
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 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.
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.
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.
The Pink Dress (play)
- Plays
Children's puppet show that tells the story of a girl incarcerated with her family at Amache . Los Angeles-based playwright and Triumvirate Pi Theater Artistic Director Leslie K. Gray based the play on a story her mother, Tsuki Maruyama, told her about her childhood at Amache. By collaborating with friend and puppeteer Beth Peterson and visiting Amache with her mother, Gray came up with the concept for the play. Returning to Los Angeles, the pair collaborated with other puppeteers Sam Hale, Jamie Kim and Masanari Kawahara on the design and the concept of the show. (All served as puppeteers in the show's premiere engagement).
Old Man River (play)
- Plays
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Family – blessing or curse, Power of the past, Power of silence, Quest for discovery
- Available
One-woman play about the playwright's search for the truth about her actor father's life story. Jerry Fujikawa was a successful Nisei actor after World War II who worked steadily in character roles in movies and television and who did well enough to own a home and put three children through college. But after his death in 1983, playwright and performer Cynthia Gates Fujikawa found a picture of her father with a woman who is not her mother and a little girl who looks like her, but is not. Old Man River documents her search for her father's history, in which his wartime incarceration at Manzanar and stint in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team play a key role.
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.