Anita Booher as Ada - photo credit Rick Pollock

For the rest of the summer, our weekly postings will be written by actors about their most memorable Plan-B role. We begin with Anita Booher, who has appeared in THE LARAMIE PROJECT, PATIENT A, a buncha SLAMs, THE LARAMIE PROJECT: TEN YEARS LATER and BLOCK 8 for Plan-B.

Topaz, the Japanese internment camp in our own backyard, was the focus of the most memorable I’ve been privileged to play for Plan-B. It was in Matthew Ivan Bennett’s BLOCK 8. I played Ada, a Mormon woman who found work running a small library in the Topaz camp. There she was obligated to work with a group of people about whom she knew nothing and feared. In BLOCK 8, Ada begins to care about one young Japanese-American man who was struggling to understand how he ended up in the camp and how he would define himself within the framework of war. Ada struggled with feelings of confusion, alienation, loneliness, and worry for her son serving in the Pacific during the war. It was a beautiful piece about how two people can struggle to push past prejudice and fear and empathize with each other’s struggles. It was another example of how a playwright and Plan-B can bring intimate and quiet stories to life to touch and educate their audiences.

While I could identify with Ada’s desire to help and nurture a student, every new role brings anxiety and the desire to bring truth and life to the character. Every role demands that one prepare as much as possible to understand the times, setting, and aspects of oneself and the character. The journey of preparing to play Ada began with a field trip with Jerry (our director) and Bryan Kido (Ken) to visit the Topaz site and museum outside of Delta. It was a valuable step in understanding the isolation Ada would have felt. Standing on the site one can see only dry, desolate land in all directions. I called on that vision and the feeling of separation many times in playing the role. My preparation also entailed reading books on the Japanese internment process and scouring the resources found on Densho.org and the Topaz Museum website. Bryan Kido helped me to find the maternal and nurturing quality Ada feels for Ken by being not only a terrific actor but a polite and gracious young man as well.

We did have some bumps along the way during the run. Bryan began to suffer chest pains and shortness of breath during some early performances. It became so bad that Bryan and Jerry worked out a signal to end a performance should the pain become too much to continue. Those performances were a little nerve-wracking, wondering if we would be stopping any moment. Bryan bravely persevered and we later discovered that he had done one performance with a collapsed lung. His medical problems were addressed, but he was later unable to continue in the last week of the run. Our houses were sold out with a few performances added, so it was decided to complete the run with Jerry onstage with script in hand. I admit that I was nervous about the substitution and playing off of an actor on script. But my fears were allayed by Jerry’s ability and attitude. To say that he was unflappable in that situation is an understatement; he demonstrated no nervousness whatsoever. We missed Bryan and regretted that he was not able to see the character Ken through to the end, but were also grateful that all of the audiences could experience Matt’s play, audiences that included descendants of internees and some who had actually been interned at Topaz. It was an honor to perform before them and relate their history.

I am most grateful to Plan-B, Jerry, Matt and Bryan for the opportunity to bring Ada to life in BLOCK 8.

Learn more about our upcoming 2011/12 season here!

The show must go on. Today, Bryan Kido, who plays Ken, was to have blogged about his experience as part of BLOCK 8. However, he arrived at the theatre and informed us that his lung had collapsed. We discussed our options and it all boiled down to one thing–Bryan wanted to go on. So I agreed to watch that day’s performance and Bryan agreed to give me a nod if he needed to stop the show. I stood by Jennifer, our stage manager, throughout the performance. Every time Bryan took a breath we’d look at each other–”Is this it?” Several times throughout the performance I texted Bryan’s mother with updates – she and his father were on stand-by to take Bryan to the hospital.

Bryan powered through the show, giving his best performance to date. As soon as he was out of costume, his parents whisked him away to University Hospital. And we sent good energy his way, hoping for his speedy recovery and that he’d be able to return to the final week of the run.

***Update, Thursday, March 12, 2009***Bryan was unable to re-join BLOCK 8 for the final week of the run. I had to go on with a script in hand. It’s good that I’m Japanese and knew the blocking; but, um, yeah, I don’t look 23. Anyway, the audiences were gracious and I received many calls, emails and Facebook messages sending healing energy Bryan’s way. He had to have a more complicated surgery than was hoped for yesterday. He’s in intensive care for the next three days but so far, things are looking good for him. Here’s to a speedy recovery Bryan.

***Update, Monday, March 23, 2009***Bryan is actually able to go home today after 23 days in the hospital! Unfortunately, his other lung collapsed following his surgery so he will need to return in the summer for follow-up surgery. But for now, it’s wonderful news that he is headed home.

BLOCK 8 is open! This is such a rewarding time in the acting process; you finally see and feel the fruition of the long hours and hard work. I’m so proud of the reaction that Matt’s play is receiving.

The lead-up to our official opening night was preceded by two notable preview audiences. The first was the audience in the fundraiser preview benefiting the Topaz Museum in Delta. At least two audience members had been internees at Topaz, and, believe me, that gave added weight to the performance that evening. The second preview was to an audience of junior high students whose history teachers had completed a unit on the internment. All of the students had read at least one book about that time. They were a wonderful audience, and, in the talk back at the conclusion of the show, they asked some good questions. Because Jerry and Matt have both done such extensive research on the subject, the students received an even more detailed history lesson from them in the talk back session.

These two audiences allowed us the opportunity to honor the experiences and memory of those Japanese-Americans who had lived in Topaz, as well as educating a much younger generation about this time and place. I can only hope that all of our audiences come away having learned something and being moved by the play.

Once when I was in high school, I was loitering at my friend Suzanne’s house after school. On that day, Suzanne’s father came home from work early and joined our conversation. Somehow we ended up discussing World War II, and Suzanne asked her father to share his family story with. As it turns out, Suzanne’s father was born in an internment camp, and spent more than the first year of his life confined by the barbed wire around the perimeter of the camp. As a result of the internment, members of his family suffered health problems that they would deal with for the rest of their lives.

The details of this story are lost someplace in my memory, but since I have been working on this production I have been thinking about that day a lot. That was the day that I realized that all of the numbers and statistics that we hear about on TV and read about in the newspapers are about individual people, with individual stories. The events presented to us in history books are not abstract events or footnotes in a larger topic. They are events that affect generations of people, and events that need to be remembered and spoken about in a way that is true to the complexities of daily life in a world where nothing has ever been simple.

As the lighting designer for BLOCK 8, my job is to create an environment that is correct for each moment in the play, and in creating the environment, reveal the actors and the scenery at the right moment in the right mood. I try to make sure that the color and the intensity of the light in each scene is right, and that there is nothing extra, and nothing missing from the lighting. In order to do this, sometimes you need to be a detached observer, constantly adjusting until everything is right.

On this production, remaining detached from the action has occasionally been a challenge for me. This play takes moments from our collective past and presents them in a way that honors the complexities and realities of the individuals involved. The characters are just like the seemingly ordinary people that we meet day to day, only to discover that they have an extraordinary story. At times I have found the story and the acting so captivating, that I have gotten a little distracted from my job. For a moment, I might find myself watching the rehearsal like an audience member would during a performance. I think about that afternoon in my friend’s house and realize that BLOCK 8 makes the numbers and details of the internment real. I hope that I reveal the story it in the right light.

On one level, a play is an outerworld crystallization of a writer’s psyche. No matter how neutral you try to be as a playwright, a play is filtered through your memories, thoughts, feelings, secret fears and hopes. A good writer -or, at least, an honest one – concedes to this fact and accepts that a play is a snapshot of his or her mind. A bad writer resists this and the writing becomes an intellectual exercise instead of a vital expression.

That said, a play never tries to be a psychic crystallization; it merely is one. Only a bad writer turns a play into introspection. A proper play isn’t introspection; a play is about something beyond the self.

BLOCK 8 is about the deep need to belong. Ken, the hero, is ripped away from college life and is forcibly put in a camp. He physically survives the process. A new, although precarious, sense of safety is established in the strange camp life; but, what cannot be immediately gotten again is the simple feeling of belonging. He stops feeling like an American. His loyalty is questioned. His parents slip into a silent shame. His sister rebels; he never sees her. He is hardly able to talk to anyone because of the anger at the situation.

Many Japanese-Americans who were interned found a rich experience of community in the camps, but a national sense of not-belonging was common to many as well. A number felt that by the fact of their incarceration, they were being told that they weren’t wanted – after they’d tilled America’s soil, contributed enormously to its economy, grown up in its grade schools and watched its movies. My play contains clear political themes, but deep down, it’s about one people disowning another and the bumpy road back.

Ada, Ken’s only friend in the camp, and a white woman, is also searching for belonging.Like a lot of men and women during World War II, she is obliged to take up a job far from home. Her son signs up for the Pacific theatre of war, her husband stays in Salt Lake, and she finds herself in Topaz: a community of 8,000 ethnic Japanese whom she distrusts. She finds herself in the strange land of war, where you’ve got to be careful whom you talk to, where no one can tell if prayers are working.

After a week of rehearsal I watched a run-through and the play-as-a-magic-mirror is very apparent. I wrote a play centered on the Japanese-American internment and my way into the subject was through the human need that’s strongest in my life right now: belonging. Within the play’s world, Ken needs to be recognized as loyal; he needs to belong. Ada is lonely, displaced, deprived of a family; she needs a confidant. The real world is the same for me. I don’t know what to make of it. I hesitate to write about it because acknowledging it seems like admitting the play is introspection. WhenI was writing it, my empathy for Ken and Ada, and real people like them, was strong; but I didn’t directly identify in the sense of seeing myself like them. Of course I don’t pretend at all that I know what internment is like now. I’m just saying that the play’s theme of belonging is now a theme in my life.

Also, when I began writing this “political” play, I felt nervous because I’ve never considered myself politically-minded. When I saw the first run-through, I realized that the main dramatic question in the play is ultra-political and ultra-personal: How do you balance a need to belong with the need of integrity, if the group truly needs you and your loneliness is poisoning you? The question before the “if” is easy enough to answer – but that question is never asked in a void.

I’m asking this question because I don’t know the answer. I do know that there’s more than one. I know that parts of the question reflect a limited perspective. And I know that it’s a question for more than just me.

From the February 2009 issue of Catalyst Magazine

What are you?

That was the most common question asked of me when I moved to Salt Lake City 15 years ago.

Well, I am half Japanese. My natural mother, Harue Ueda, was a child in Nagasaki when the bomb fell to end World War II. I was adopted into a Caucasian family at the age of 8, so I really never thought about myself as anything but, well, white. And I grew up in a heavily Mexican community in southeastern Arizona, so the idea that my skin might be darker than someone else’s never crossed my mind.

What are you?

The question suggests something out of balance, a problem to solve. At first I didn’t really understand the question. But it kept coming and I realized I just might be different-looking from the average Salt Laker, circa 1994.

What are you?

Late in 1994, I happened upon a shelf of books about the Japanese internment in the City Library. I discovered an internment camp named Topaz had been located in Utah during World War II. The internment was something I had known about peripherally at best. And although I knew I was of Japanese ancestry, I had never really thought about that part of me as a part of me. Until that day in the library when I realized that, had I lived in a West Coast state during World War II, I would have been interned.

Internment
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the creation of internment camps on U.S. soil. According to the 1940 census, there were 127,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States. The vast majority (120,000) lived in West Coast states, predominantly in California. Those 120,000 were ‘evacuated’ from their homes. About 10,000 were able to voluntarily relocate to inland states. The remaining 110,000 were interned in 10 camps in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah.

From there it gets complicated. Two-thirds of those interned were U.S. citizens – the first generation born in the U.S. (Nisei). Their parents (Issei) had immigrated to the U.S. but were barred from becoming citizens due to a 1922 Supreme Court ruling upholding the 1884 Exclusion Act, which excluded persons of Asian ancestry from becoming citizens.

In 1940, Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact, creating an alliance with Germany and Italy. That prompted President Roosevelt to engage Curtis Munson to conduct a study to determine the sympathies and loyalties of Japanese Americans living in California in 1941. The Munson Report found that ‘Japanese Americans possess an extraordinary degree of loyalty to the U.S.’ and that ‘immigrant Japanese are of no danger to the U.S.’ The findings were quietly disregarded. By the fall of 1942, ten internment camps were in operation on U.S. soil.

Topaz
Topaz opened on September 11, 1942. Located sixteen miles west of Delta, the camp was populated with over 8,000 Japanese Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area, who arrived with only what they could carry.

In January of 1943, President Roosevelt announced that volunteers from the internment camps would be accepted into the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Nisei combat unit. Residents seventeen years of age and older in all the camps were given a questionnaire. Two questions troubled internees: Question 27 asked, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?” Question 28 asked, “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization?”

The 442nd became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service, receiving more than 18,000 individual citations for bravery and nearly 9,500 Purple Hearts.

Topaz closed on October 31, 1945. Each internee was given $25 and a train ticket to their former homes, where the majority returned to find they had lost everything. It took until 1988 – 53 years from the end of World War II – or the U.S. Government to issue a formal apology.

Block 8
The question of loyalty lies at the heart of Plan-B Theatre Company’s world premiere production of BLOCK 8.

Since that day in the library in 1994, I’ve wanted to find a way to create a play about the Japanese internment experience. When I discovered playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett’s mutual interest in Topaz a little over a year ago, the creation of BLOCK 8 was inevitable.

BLOCK 8 is a simple, two-person drama about an unlikely friendship. Ken (played by Bryan Kido) is a young Nisei internee at Topaz grappling with whether to enlist in the military to prove his loyalty to the United States. Ada (played by Anita Booher) is a Caucasian librarian at Topaz whose son is fighting in the Pacific. The tentative relationship between Ken and Ada offers insight into the paranoia, distrust and xenophobia that led to the existence of Japanese internment camps.

With Barack Obama in the White House, his pledge to dismantle Guantanomo Bay and his pick of Japanese General Eric Shinseki to lead Veteran Affairs, the future seems brighter for race relations in the United States. But in a post-9/11 world, could it happen again?

What are you?

**BLOCK 8 is the centerpiece of Utah’s 2009 Day of Remembrance events.**