Browse > Media Type > Plays
50 articles
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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.
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.
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).
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 …
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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