Another show

Sometimes things seem meant to be.  So, the power inexplicably went out on our block around 4 pm, it came back on about an hour later, but not in the attic, where I live.  (Apparently, the breaker box is in someone's room, someone who is currently in Vegas.  It's 11 pm now, still no power.  There needs to be a back-up plan.  This was a problem in my former house as well.  The landlords build in as many rooms as they legally can (in this house, more than is legal), blocking off access to water mains and circuit breakers, so the tenants are kinda' stuck if something breaks down and the person who lives in the room is gone.)  'Nough about that, my computer is overheating so I'll write fast.

So I had reserved a ticket to a show, "Hold These Truths," by Jeanne Sakata at ACT for tonight, but I was feeling like I didn't want to go out and was going to call and cancel the ticket.  My singing/polyglot roommate was teaching my musician roommate fado music, which was sounding pretty amazing and I was enjoying listening to it, but as my power was still out by that point, I decided to go to the show after all.

It was based on the life of Gordon Hirabayashi; I wrote about him earlier in the year, after I had gone to a symposium on him.  He was a Nisei, American citizen, who refused to obey the curfew put on American citizens of Japanese descent and also refused to report for internment camp.  He was tried and convicted on both counts.  The conviction was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost.  He was retried in 1987 and exonerated, when new evidence emerged that evidence had been suppressed during the original trial.  Even after his exoneration, he spent the last years of his life in Canada.

Anyway, the play was fantastic.  It's a one-man show.  Good-pacing, and a powerful story about principle and courage (as well as cowardice), and wrongs that were committed.  When he was interviewed both for this play, as well as for a documentary that was made in the early 90's, he was very concerned of the same thing happening to other ethnic groups.  It can so easily happen again. (You have to stay awake.  And speak up.)

During the Q & A after the show, one person said that his mother was one of the people who gave money to help fund Mr. Hirabayashi's defense.  Regular people paid for his defense with checks of $5 and $10.  There was a Japanese exchange student in the audience who had just arrived in the States today, her grandmother was living in Canada at the time of the war and her family was forced to sell everything and go back to Japan.  Another man was from a country where something similar had happened to his family, he had just flown back from Stockholm a couple of hours before the show started tonight.

It's powerful.  I pretty much cried through the whole thing.  My only regrets for the show are that it's playing a relatively small room, and for a very short run (four shows, the last of which is tomorrow), so not enough people will see it.  And I feel it's important that people come see it.  We need to remember all of our history, the noble as well as the ugly; as one of the Justices said (to the effect) in one of the other cases (there were three that went to the Supreme Court) that was not a unanimous decision, you can't fight for democracy abroad while letting it crumble at home, because then you have won nothing.

Far and away the best show I've seen this year: story, writing, acting, directing, technical...all spot on.  I've mentioned before that it's important that everyone working on a show should be on the same page as far as the story they want to tell and why...this production nailed that.  Just fantastic.