Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi Emily Roxworthy Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi. By Jeanne Sakata. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky. East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, Los Angeles. 1 December 2007. Although Dawn’s Light seems most noteworthy for introducing audiences to real-life Nisei civilrights activist Gordon Hirabayashi—a man who has been called the Rosa Parks of Japanese America for resisting the World War II internment—behind this one-man show stands a woman making her playwriting debut in a fairly inhospitable climate for new plays by minority voices. Playwright Jeanne Sakata made her name as an actress of stage and screen: in 2002, she won an LA Ovation Award for Best Lead Actress for her performance as Beijing Opera star Master Hua in Chay Yew’s Red at East West Players; during the 2006–07 season, Sakata defied stereotyped expectations that an Asian actress could not [End Page 661] conjure the fierce passion needed to portray Italian opera diva Maria Callas in East West’s production of Terrence McNally’s Master Class—a veritable oneperson show itself. Red and Master Class represent the two competing though complementary poles that sustain a long-standing ethnic theatre company like East West Players, which commits itself both to celebrating the work of prominent Asian American playwrights such as Yew, and providing opportunities for underemployed Asian American performers (such as Sakata) to take on the prominent roles usually reserved for white actors. Dawn’s Light, on the other hand, represents a quieter mission that guarantees the future of minority theatre in this country: cultivating new playwrights (especially women and artists of color) that larger mainstream institutions have found increasingly easy to abandon. In the wake of her award-winning performance in Red, Yew—who also headed the now-defunct Asian Theater Workshop at LA’s Center Theater Group—decided in 2003 to give Sakata a commission to complete her unfinished play about Hirabayashi, which had not yet coalesced as a one-person show despite Sakata’s decade of intensive research into the topic. In this climate of minority-playwright development (eliminated by Center Theater Group in 2005), Sakata finally realized Dawn’s Light as a solo documentary play. It weaves together her own interviews with Hirabayashi himself, who remains active as he approaches age ninety, although he has long since retired from his position as a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta; wartime letters written by Hirabayashi that are now housed in the University of Washington archives; accounts of his infamous Supreme Court case Hirabayashi v. United States; and oral histories gathered from Hirabayashi’s surviving family, friends, and acquaintances. Yet Dawn’s Light bears stronger resemblance to the interview-based solo plays of Anna Deavere Smith than to the recent wave of multi-actor documentary plays such as Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain’s Guantánamo or David Hare’s Stuff Happens, which indict the systemic intolerance and injustice of US policies at home and abroad. These documentary plays may have gathered particular force in the British and American theatre since the disastrous interventions undertaken by the Bush administration in response to 9/11, but documentary playwrights have cut their teeth on earlier transgressions of the US government—not least of which include the World War II evacuation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of whom held US citizenship) from the West Coast. Even so, Sakata’s play about one of the few internment resisters contains little of the strident melodrama or hypertheatricalized caricatures wielded against the US perpetrators in the main vein of contemporary documentary plays. In the place of such easily identifiable theatrical villains, Dawn’s Light gives the audience humanizing, empathetic portraits even of the military leaders, prison guards, and Supreme Court justices who were unapologetically complicit in perpetrating the US internment policy six decades ago. Certainly part of the impetus behind empathizing with the perpetrators comes from the fact that all these characters are played across one performer’s body: that of Korean American actor Ryun Yu, who balanced dozens of portraits with virtuosity and charisma on the evening I saw him perform...