Jeanne Sakata’s ‘Hold These Truths’

Dance/theater artist Makoto Hirano, with director Daniel Student, shows considerable verve — he tackles, in his first play, not a physical performance piece but a one-person monologue incorporating over 30 characters, lasting just shy of two hours, without intermission.

Evolution or revolution?

Gordon Hirabayashi, born in Seattle in 1918 to Japanese immigrants, was raised with his parents’ pacifist philosophy. He had a “stupidly honest” father who sold fruit and vegetables, and a “family dynamo” of a mother.

Hirabayashi grappled with the implications of Quakerism and Constitutional solidarity, holding onto the words in the Constitution’s preamble about “ensur[ing] domestic tranquility.” Unlike his classmates, he promoted “evolution” over “revolution” and kept faith in the United States’ idealistic founding documents and legal system, even as he faced blatant discrimination as a Japanese American.

Sakata’s play, which features so much dialogue among characters that you begin to wonder about her choice to tell this story with one actor instead of an ensemble, follows Hirabayashi as he fights the government’s creeping oppression of Japanese-American citizens in the 1940s, first with curfew orders and then internment in prison camps surrounded by guns and barbed wire.

An odd insouciance

In Sakata’s telling, Hirabayashi is a likable and unexpected mix of idealism, stubbornness, and an odd insouciance. Refusing to obey the curfew and then internment, even as his family has abandoned everything but what they can carry in two suitcases for transit to the camps, Hirabayashi served many months in jail despite his appeals. The Supreme Court at first declined to rule on his case, but in 1944, on a separate challenge, upheld the constitutionality of internment as an appropriate exercise of power in wartime.

Hirabayashi eventually served 90 days in a prison work camp near Tucson, though the sentencing officials had no provision for delivering him there from Washington State. So he took two weeks to hitchhike there alone, “free to commit espionage and sabotage all the way,” he quips. “I finally managed to get myself incarcerated.”

Later, he served another year in prison for refusing to answer a loyalty questionnaire associated with the military draft, on the grounds that it’s racially discriminatory, since it’s given only to Japanese Americans.

It took until 1987 for a federal appeals court to overturn Hirabayashi’s conviction. Meanwhile, he got a master’s degree and doctorate in sociology and went on to teach in Beirut, Cairo, and Edmonton. His memoir, A Principled Stand, was published in 2013. He died on January 2, 2012, just a few months before President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, alongside Madeleine Albright, John Glenn, and Toni Morrison.

Distracting design

Hirano shows an active and sensitive physicality, even in small moments as he inclines his body to his two silent, black-clad helpers, in the tradition of kabuki theater’s Kuroko stagehands. But many design elements are overblown, including near-neon washes of light and a small stage (the box on Plays & Players’ top floor) that seems crowded with screens and props. It often feels as if Hirano barely has time to tell the story as he darts around, holding frames, ducking behind screens, and casting shadows.

The sound design also distracts from Hirano’s potential. Do we really need a machine-gun overlay because Hirabayashi is musing on World War II? The show is punctuated with loud bangs (which could be gunshots, drums, cell doors, or gavels) alternating with the sound of breaking waves (which don’t seem to connect to the script at all).

But maybe the apparent clutter of Student’s production of this one-man show mirrors the clutter of an American society still trying and failing to live up to the apparently simple tenets of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The death of American exceptionalism?

From questions of “assimilation” into American culture, Constitutional protections that U.S. judicial and law enforcement officials fail to honor, and institutionalized racism, the themes of Hirabayashi’s story couldn’t be more relevant. And a play about the reality of Japanese-American internment, a terrible chapter of U.S. history that is so often passed over in WWII narratives, is especially poignant given some of our current educational flaps. With the Oklahoma state legislature’s attempt to defund AP history courses as insufficient vehicles for American exceptionalism, or the Texas State Board of Education’s recent vote to declare in its textbooks that Moses and the Old Testament are foundational to U.S. democracy, an accurate engagement with America’s past seems to be slipping away from us by the moment.

In Hold These Truths, advice to recently released Japanese Americans comes over a loudspeaker: “Try to make a favorable impression on everyone you meet.” The echoes of this are heard today in advice to black men on how to deal with attention from law enforcement officials without being arrested, beaten, or shot. Both reflect the assumption that it is the responsibility of an oppressed group to mitigate the feelings and actions of racists.

If we forget stories like Hirabayashi’s, things are never going to change.