Trump's treasonous betrayal of the oath he swore in front of millions of television viewers -- "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" -- leaves people all over the world asking a very painful question: If immigrants seeking political asylum are willing to take an oath to "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen... and support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." doesn't that make such immigrants better people than Donald Trump?
Stated more simply: Who is the real enemy of the people? The so-called "fake media"? "The poor?" "The huddled masses yearning to breathe free?" Or the parasitic, pusillanimous, pompous, perjury-prone, privileged and paranoid pussy-grabbing pustule who currently occupies the Oval Office? I don't mean to be rude -- I'm just asking for a friend.
During the weekend before Trump bared his lice-infested traitor's taint to the world, I attended two plays about the experience of discovering what it feels like to have been "othered" by the society to which someone rightfully assumed he belonged.
- One play was based on a true story about a Japanese-American, natural-born citizen of the United States (who was also a Quaker). Along with thousands of others, this man's family was stripped of their possessions, their dignity, and their legal rights as defined in the United States Constitution, by the cruelty of Executive Order 9066 issued by the President of the United States. Nevertheless, Gordon Hirabayashi persisted.
- The other (also based on a true story) was a dark comedy about an artist who felt grievously betrayed by a long-time friend who could have done him a big favor...but didn't.
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Having grown up on the East Coast, I knew nothing about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II until I moved to San Francisco in 1972 and found myself living in a city with a large Asian-American population that produced an annual Asian-American film festival. One of my earliest lessons about the results of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's loathsome Executive Order came from reading Steve Kluger's heart-warming 1998 epistolary novel entitled The Last Days of Summer.Numerous documentaries followed, as well as several stage plays such as Kevin McKeon's adaptation of David Guterson's award-winning 1994 novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (produced by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in 2011) and Jeanne Sakata's poignant Turning the Page: The Story of Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, the provocative monologue staged by TheatreFIRST this spring which relates how an Asian-American woman came across proof that Pentagon personnel had attempted to destroy a document entitled "Final Report on Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast." Why? Published in 1943, the report clearly stated that, following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans posed no threat to the security of the United States.
Another monologue crafted by Sakata with aching beauty is currently receiving its Bay area premiere at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto. Hold These Truths delivers a master class on the tragic impact of "fake news" on the lives of real people. Its protagonist is Gordon Hirabayashi, a Japanese-American male who, when his family was being uprooted and sent to an American concentration camp, stood up for his rights and refused to obey FDR's Executive Order.
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| Joel de la Fuente appears as Gordon Hirabayashi in Hold These Truths (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Hold These Truths premiered at the East West Players in Los Angeles on November 7, 2007, with Ryan Yu portraying Hirabayashi (the play's initial title was Dawn's Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi). In 2012, Sakata's play was produced by several small theatres on the East Coast. During its run at the Epic Theatre Ensemble in New York, the playwright was interviewed about what made Hirabayashi's story so compelling to her.
Although Hirabayashi's amazing saga has been memorialized in Steven Okazaki's 1986 film, Unfinished Business (which was nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature) and Hirabayashi's 2013 memoir, A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies) that was posthumously published by the University of Washington Press, Sakata's play wins over the audience with Gordon's naive determination to fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court for his Constitutional rights. After having lived with Alzheimer's disease for 11 years, Hirabayashi died in Edmonton, Alberta on January 2, 2012 at the age of 93. In her director’s note, Lisa Rothe writes:
“This year marks the 10th anniversary of my involvement with Hold These Truths, a decade of almost unprecedented highs and lows in our nation’s history. The play’s original title, Dawn’s Light, reflected the national mood in 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then, transforming what was originally a dramatic snapshot of a historical moment (the forced relocation and incarceration of thousands of Japanese American families during World War II) into an emblem of how the country has recently lost its way again. In light of this proverbial fall from grace, the play’s updated title, Hold These Truths, reflects the need to actively champion the democratic principle that all people are created equal, nativism notwithstanding.”
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| Joel de la Fuente appears as Gordon Hirabayashi in Hold These Truths (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“The story of Hold These Truths also has a geographical component. Produced in New York City in 2012 by Epic Theatre Ensemble, the play resonated as a vivid retelling of a dark chapter in American history. This production also served as a kind of eulogy to Gordon Hirabayashi, who died in January, 2012. In Hawaii, where we partnered with actor/producer Daniel Dae Kim and Honolulu Theatre for Youth in 2013, the healing potential of the play came to the fore, allowing internment survivors (and their loved ones, friends, and neighbors) to witness their stories onstage. Even if the play fell short of providing actual catharsis, our hope was that the audience members may have felt less marginalized, thanks to the way Gordon’s personal history mirrored their own.”
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| Joel de la Fuente appears as Gordon Hirabayashi in Hold These Truths (Photo by: Lia Chang) |
In recent years, many people have learned about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II from actor George Takei, whose celebrity as an original cast member of Star Trek (as well as his social activism on Facebook and steady presence in mass media) have made him an oracle to his fans. Takei championed and appeared in a new musical inspired by his family's experiences during World War II (Allegiance will be staged by the Contra Costa Civic Theatre from September 21 to October 21).
Because Takei (who recently turned 81) was 19 years younger than Hirabayashi when FDR issued Executive Order 9066, as a child he had a very different perception of the politics of the moment. However, with the Trump administration's xenophobic polices against Muslims, Mexicans, and other people of color, Takei has continued to speak out against the evils of racism, following in the footsteps of older Japanese Americans like Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu.
Witnessing Joel de la Fuente's exquisitely layered performance in Hold These Truths helps audiences put a human face on the kind of discrimination feared not only by Latin American immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border of the United States, but by naturalized citizens who are terrified that Trump's goons will find a way to brand all immigrants as criminals in their desperation to deport people they look down on as "others."
Thanks to Lisa Rothe's sensitive direction, de la Fuente's performance charms and educates audiences while reminding them how easy it is for a hostile government to betray some of its most loyal citizens. Performances of Hold These Truths continue through August 5 at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto (click here for tickets).
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During the Whitney Museum’s 2014 biennial exhibition of contemporary art, a white artist named Joe Scanlan hired an African-American actress to bring a fictional persona of an African-American woman named Donelle Woolford to life. To protest this submission, an international group of artists of color (The YAMS Collective) withdrew their entry for the exhibition. Scanlan described his inspiration for the Woolford persona as follows:“Donelle Woolford began ten years ago when I first appropriated her name from a professional football player I admired. After the first collages happened in my studio, I liked them but they seemed like they would be more interesting if someone else made them, someone who could better exploit their historical and cultural references. So I studied the collages for a while and let them tell me who their author should be. From there the work has subtly changed (like the shift from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism), but the character of their maker, Donelle, has changed dramatically. She has become much more contradictory and complex.”Take Scanlan's story, mix it up with some flavoring from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and even darker insights from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912) and put it in the hands of a gifted African-American playwright, and you end up with a blistering drama entitled White (which won the 2015 Terrence McNally New Play Award). A controversial and extremely controversial drama by Philadelphia-based James Ijames, White looks at some of today's well-intentioned attempts at diversity (as well as such racially insulting behaviors as cultural appropriation and pretending to be "color blind") through a deservedly cynical and unforgiving lens. A founding member of the Orbiter 3 Playwright Producing Collective, Ijames explains:
"Paula Vogel says the job of the artist is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This has always struck me as deeply true and fundamental to what I hope my work as a theatre-maker does. I’m preoccupied with inheritance and legacy. What do we get from those who came before us? What will we leave behind? My plays ask an audience to work together towards examining where we’ve been and where our current actions will lead us in the future (we all need a mirror to fix our hair). This play is a gesture towards building community -- building a new kind of legacy. I want the audience to watch and to listen. Can’t change anybody’s mind if they’re asleep!"
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| Playwright James Ijames (Photo by: Beowulf Sheehan) |
Developed at the PlayPenn New Play Conference and the Gulfshore Playhouse New/Works Festival, White received its world premiere production from Theatre Horizon in April 2017. For a 90-minute drama requiring only four actors, White packs quite a wallop. Slyly directed by M. Graham Smith on Nina Ball's puzzle-like set, the play calls for two actors who are very white and two who are not.
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| Santoya Fields (Balkonaé) and Luisa Frasconi (Jane) in a scene from White (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Luisa Frasconi portrays Jane, a very white woman who has recently been promoted to the position of Senior Curator at the prestigious (and fictional) Parnell Museum. Aware of the institution’s long history of having a very conservative (and white) board of directors, Jane is determined to shake things up by curating an exhibition that will showcase the work of artists from diverse backgrounds whose work is rarely displayed in mainstream art museums.
As the play begins, Jane is speaking about her new project and why she feels it is so important. In the next scene, she is having drinks with her best friend from grad school, Gus (Adam Donovan). As they celebrate her promotion, Gus is confident that his old friend will ask him to submit a piece of his art to be included in her show. As a result, he’s shocked and genuinely wounded when Jane explains that she can't do that because he's "a white dude.”
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| Adam Donovan (Gus) and Santoya Fields (Vanessa) in a scene from White (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Truer words have never been spoken. Not only is Gus very white, he’s a very white gay man whose art tends to be the kind of bland, impersonal, white-on-white work that might look great in an Ikea showroom but lacks even the slightest hint of emotional authenticity. By the time he gets home, Gus is resentful, angry, and determined to prove Jane wrong.
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| Jed Parsario (Tanner) and Adam Donovan (Gus) in a scene from White (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Surprisingly, his lover, Tanner (Jed Parsario) is not as sympathetic as Gus expected him to be. An elementary school teacher who is taking a course in improvisation, Tanner tries to calm Gus down and seduce him so they can have some fun together. But then he poses some simple questions that are met with disturbing answers. “What do you see when you look at me?” he asks. “I see the best of me in your eyes,” replies Gus, who asks if Tanner (an Asian American man) could ask one of the black women in his improv class if she would be interested in working on a project with him.
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| Adam Donovan (Gus) and Jed Parsario (Tanner) in a scene from White (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Enter Vanessa (Santoya Fields). An aspiring actress eager to find work (yet justifiably wary of Gus’s explanation of what he’s hoping to achieve), she attempts to put a stop to Gus’s ridiculous fantasies about what kind of person a black female artist might be. When Gus starts parroting the stereotypes of sassy black women he has seen on television (and in drag shows), she asks him “Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?” Needless to say, he has not.
That doesn’t prevent Gus from clinging to the popular cliché that every gay white man has a fierce black woman inside him who is just waiting for a chance to emerge. In a hilarious moment of magic realism, Gus conjures up a reinforcing vision of the patron saint of gay men (Diana Ross), who is also played by Santoya Fields. In the true spirit of Walt Disney ("A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes"), Diana encourages Gus to find his inner black diva and use that spirit to help sell his art.
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| Adam Donovan (Gus) and Santoya Fields (Diana) in a scene from White (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Soon, Gus and Vanessa are trying to shape the backstory for the creature they will bring to life. As they try to create the perfect name for a proud, black female artist, Balkonaé (who is also portrayed by Ms. Fields) emerges victorious. But when their creature comes to life, matters start to get dangerously out of hand.
- Jane seems absolutely thrilled by the idea that she can add a black artist’s work to the museum's exhibition. With a few drinks under her belt, she feels like she’s really starting to bond with a new soul sister, leaving Gus feeling like a third wheel who is definitely not the center of attention.
- Gus is haunted by the suspicion that Vanessa’s artistic ideas are starting to replace his.
- When Gus and Tanner attend the opening of Jane’s new exhibition, Balkonaé takes on a life of her own, proving that Gus's Magical Negro is most definitely not the fruit of his imagination. Nor is Balkonaé about to take shit from Gus (or anyone else).
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| Santoya Fields as Balkonaé in a scene from White (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
With costumes designed by Ulises Alcala, sound by Cliff Caruthers, projections by Erin Gilley, and lighting by Ray Oppenheimer, Shotgun's production of White aims to push people's buttons and succeeds with flying colors. The play also does a splendid job of demonstrating how, even within the art world, well-intentioned white liberals lack a sensitivity to how their use of language impacts people of color.
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| Santoya Fields (Vanessa) and Adam Donovan (Gus) in a scene from White (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Adam Donovan perfectly embodies a gay white man who has no idea how much he has been handed in life simply because of his skin color. When Tanner suggests that Gus's art might not even as great as he'd like to think it is, Gus is aghast that his lover could say such a horrible thing. And, while Luisa Frasconi's Jane has the best of intentions, the character dives into her new project with no idea of how deeply hurt her friend Gus will be by her professional rejection or how suspicious Balkonaé will be of her motives.
That leaves Tanner, Vanessa, Diana, and Balkonaé as the nonwhite truth tellers intent on robbing the privileged Gus of his delusions of grandeur. After years of thinking that, as a gay man, he was fully entitled to minority status, discovering that he's still primarily regarded as a white dude comes as a rude shock to his belief system.
Many years ago, I had a roommate who would frequently tell people that "If anything I say offends you, that's because you're just sleepwalking through life and need to be offended." Although White may be filled with plenty of laugh lines, Ijames's play is a timely and challenging piece of work that forces its audience to confront such sensitive issues as racial tourism and code switching. It will easily make privileged members of any audience (as well as those whose calling card is a supposedly superior awareness of political correctness) justifiably uncomfortable and, as Martha Stewart used to say, "That's a good thing."
Performances of White continue at the Shotgun Players through August 5 (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer:
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