[00:05:15] Jonelle: What about audiences? Do you receive the same audiences for all types of play? Do you have a stable audience?

[00:05:22] Jeffrey: For our New Works audience, we talked about this a lot, is an off-shoot of our main audience. Most of our New Works Festival, which is a shorter project that each show has maybe two to three readings, as opposed to a full run of a mainstage show, which would have four weeks doing eight performances a week. The New Works audience is a more hardcore audience [chuckles] I would say, and a group that's really interested in seeing pieces that are still in development, pieces that are not necessarily done, but they're very loyal and a really cool audience.

Then in terms of the diversity of our audiences, I think that that's something that the entire theater world is working on, especially right now, while we're on hold on how we can be a more inclusive industry. I know it's a great passion of mine as a BIPOC artist to find ways to meet communities halfway. I will say things like The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga, Hold These Truths, which I know we're going to be talking about in a bit. Ethnically specific shows like those, they do have a bump in audience from other communities. I would say for myself, personally, and I could speak for the company, actually, that we're trying to make those numbers grow even more. We want to make sure that our audience is diverse, regardless of the show that we're doing on stage because we want our shows to be for everyone every single time we're on stage.

[00:07:04] Jon-Barrett: TheaterWork Silicon Valley hosted the regional theater premiere of Hold These Truths by Jeanne Sakata. With support from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Grant, Jeanne shares with me the inspiration and origins of her award-winning play and the story of its protagonist, Gordon Hirabayashi.

[00:07:22] Jeanne: The inspiration came in the 1990s. I was watching a PBS film, a documentary film on television. It was about this young man named Gordon Hirabayashi, who defied and legally challenged the government orders of mass incarceration of all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast. I had grown up in a thriving Japanese American community on the West Coast, in a farming town called Watsonville, California, which is just below Santa Cruz, two hours south of San Francisco. I had never heard this story before. I was stunned that I had never heard it before.

I started to wonder why I hadn't. I started to dig into doing a little research on Gordon. The more I found out, the more fascinated I was by the story. I thought this was not just a great Japanese American story or Asian American story, I thought this is a vitally important and current American story all Americans should know about Gordon as all Americans or most Americans know about Rosa Parks.

I had such a passion for the story, I became obsessed with it. I could not stop thinking about it. Being in theater at the time and being in a place in the 1990s, where I had seen one person shows which were not as common as they were now. They were a newer art form. I thought this would be a great way to tell Gordon's story. I embarked on a journey to write this play and it took me about a decade from when I first started researching it, and interviewing Gordon to its first production in 2007.

Since then, we've gone on for the last 13 years to take it all around the country. Sadly, Gordon passed away before he could see the play on stage, but he did have the program read to him by his wife. He had Alzheimer's by then and he was in a care facility.

We hope that he knows that people have heard his story. At that time, it was people here in Little Tokyo where the play premiered with East West Players, but I hope he knows that he has gone on to many other cities in the past 13 years and that his legacy has been treasured by many Americans all across the country. To me, this is a story of enlightenment. A really a classic story of enlightenment where Gordon starts off growing up in a very racist society. His goal really, like so many Japanese American families at the time, was not to change things. It was simply to survive. Up until his college years, he and a lot of other American-born Japanese Americans, they lived in a very schizophrenic existence, where they were proud of being Americans and proud of their country and what it stood for.

Yet, on a daily basis being denied those freedoms and those privileges that come with the status of being an American citizen. He said, "You hope for the day when things will get better but you're not going to stand up to try and change things today because you're trying to get through high school. You're trying to get to college. You're trying to help your parents just get through the month." Gordon was a born people person. He majored in sociology and when he got to college, the world opened up to him.

All of a sudden he was with many, many students from around the country, even around the world. He stayed in an international dormitory at the YMCA. This was the world he found himself in when the older Gordon starts the play and then he remembers his college years. That's the atmosphere that the younger Gordon comes into. He's trying to just live this normal college life as normal as it can be, knowing that he cannot have access to certain places in downtown Seattle, which will not admit people of Japanese ancestry.

That kind of schizophrenia is going on, and then Pearl Harbor is bombed and everything changes for Gordon and for other Japanese American students at the University of Washington. Overnight, there are people that view them as the enemy even though they're Americans of Japanese ancestry. Many people do not see any difference. All of a sudden Gordon has to deal with extraordinary questions. What's going to happen to his parents? What's going to happen to his community?

Orders come out for a mandatory curfew for all people of Japanese ancestry. Gordon initially goes along with that and then he decides because he realizes that all the international students that he lives with at the YMCA are free to not have to obey this curfew, he, the American, has to. Once he realizes that, he realizes he cannot go through with it and so he defies that curfew.

Then the much more worse orders come out for all people of Japanese ancestry to have to leave their home, sell all their positions in a weeks' time, and go to an unknown place. Gordon realizes after going along with this order and intending to obey that he cannot. This is a much worse violation of his constitutional rights than the curfew is. He decides to defy that and legally challenge it. Once he does that, he goes on an incredible journey as a result of confronting this racist order.

[00:13:35] Jon-Barrett: Mikiko Suzuki McAdams was a scenic designer for the New York debut of Hold These Truths. Her designs followed the show and adapted as it toured through different theaters across the country. She's designed sets for large-scale operas and theater productions, and pairs down her design for this production of one man telling his story, giving the focus to its performer, Joel de la Fuente.

[00:14:01] Mikiko: I always believed in, the great story can be told in the corner of the room with one stool, somebody sits on there and talk. This was exactly like that. I think the scale of the story is the scale of him, the character, and how big Gordon really is. I worked with Joel, he's a wonderful actor who is so attractive to watch, very entertaining and then I feel no matter what set designer or designers do, it's really casing on a cake-- icing on cake.

Seriously, I thought Joel can do this with the Jeanne's writing. Him and one chair would do this. Then that's what I really thought and I talked to Director Lisa. It's almost like I feel like we tried to help for create a space for Joel to go place in this one little space to a location to location of where Gordon is in the storytelling. That's what we needed to do. Our New York Premier, it was at the 14th Street Y I think YMCA space and a pretty big black box theater.

We actually did two shows in this one set. That is also affected within but the reason why in the round and all sort of different chairs in the room and as the audience was looking at each other and we wanted to create a space of the space. We just like really telling a story to each other sort of feel. Audience was the space and then those chairs were the space. That led to where we have for the whole this design now. It's developed from it.

We know the process of why it's becoming how it is, like a red square floor, and then with background, which lighting designer can change the color and texture. Then when pendant lights as sometimes read as a moon for Gordon to travel outside. Also, the big window hanging from the ceiling, it was a church. It was church.

[00:17:09] Jon-Barrett: What are some of the challenges of taking it from a small black box, which for a one-person show seems perfect and intimate, and then moving it to a larger stage.

[00:17:22] Mikiko: It's all on Joel's performance shoulder and his capacity of how he can hold the energy for small to huge theater is totally his skill, I think. A lighting designer, of course, helps to create the intimate space with the lighting but he could hold pretty big space. His energy is unbelievable.

[00:17:52] Jon-Barrett: Jeffrey Lo shares with Jonelle some of the other projects TheaterWorks Silicon Valley is working on, including the recently launched online initiative, Voices of Democracy.

[00:18:02] Jeffrey: With Voices of Democracy, it's going to be an encompassing thing where we're talking about how can people be better citizens of their community. We're not necessarily talking about when you hear democracy, we're not necessarily talking about America and the government. Although one of the major things that we are starting with is our Get Out The Vote Initiative as a part of Voices of Democracy.

We're talking about the democratic process, in that, we want everyone to realize and utilize their voice as a tool for good and a tool for change. That's why it was important for us to combine both voices and democracy when we were titling this program. What we're trying to do is we're trying to find ways that our art be it the video that I shared with you beforehand, which was an amazing group of actors reading a spoken word poetry piece, or music or interviews with artists.

All of it is geared towards not allowing us to just be okay with being good people, but also being actively good people. I think the words that a lot of organizations are using and what I know that we are working on as an organization right now is how do we transition from being an organization in a group of people who are not racist, for example, to being anti-racist? How do we take action?

What we're hoping to do, and we're still a theater company, we're still an arts organization. What we're trying to do with Voices of Democracy is create programming, all of it digitally right now because that's how we can do work, we can't get into big groups, but how do we be mindful about the work that we create and the work that we produce, like that poetry piece called Courage Rising, by Beau Sia, to hopefully inspire groups of people, be it young people, be it communities of color, be it anybody? How do we create art that's going to get people to want to stand up and be like, "Oh, I'm going to make donations to this nonprofit organization." Or, "I'm going to write letters for a cause that I believe in." Whatever it is.

[00:20:21] Jonelle: Or, "I'm going to talk to my neighbor in a civil voice about an issue that we disagree on."

[00:20:26] Jeffrey: Yes, absolutely. Any of those things. We're hoping that this can inspire some change and as we get out of our Zoom boxes and out of our screens, it'll expand upon itself. Right now we're trying to create a lot of digital work and I think that hopefully, the digital work creates some great access for people who wouldn't have access normally.

[00:20:50] Jonelle: Yes, I agree. There's a special digital space that has been carved out for us introverts. I feel very welcome in this space.

[00:21:00] Jeffrey: Good.

[00:21:01] Jonelle: Okay. How is TheaterWorks Silicon Valley shaping those formative years of, I think the current figure is 14,000 Bay students annually. Does that sound right to you?

[00:21:15] Jeffrey. Does. It does. There's a number of programs that we've been doing in our education department and that's continuing to evolve. We do a school tour that touches so many minds. Right now what it has been-- Although we've commissioned a wonderful writer named Idris Goodwin to write a new piece based on racial justice. We have a series called the Oskar Torres Series, which includes a number of shows, but Prince Gomolvilas is an Asian American player. Oh, I think he's Thai. I'm sorry, Prince. We're friends. I'm sorry that I think you're Thai but anyways.

He has written a group of pieces that have for us to tour in schools, and three of them, that I can remember off the top of my head, one is called Oskar And The Big Bully Battle, which explores bullying and also how to be an ally to those that are being bullied and to how to not be a bully. There's another piece called Oskar And The Last Straw, which is about stress management for young people. Then the latest one that has been written is called Oskar And The Countless Costume Changes, which talks about gender perception.

[00:22:32] Jonelle: Yes. Now, are these programs available beyond the Bay? I mean, as a PTA parent in the Southern California region, how do we get our hands on Oskar?

[00:22:42] Jeffrey: Well, what's really cool, again, as we were saying with the access that the digital realm creates, for the most part, what we do is it's a cast of three and they tour live to different schools, and they have assemblies. In addition to the show itself, we train and work with our three actors to also be teaching artists where they have post-show discussions with the students to really make sure that the themes of the show resonate. Again, go from empathy to action where they can see, "Oh, Oskar's going through this, or, oh, Beth and Frank are going through this." And then we have a discussion.

We're like, "Okay, well because they were going through this, if you were in this situation, how could you help? Or how could you prevent this?" With the digital realm, we are working currently, I don't know the exact specifics of it but we are working towards creating a temporary digital version of these shows, which again, once we have information on it, maybe you can let your schools know so they can get access to it as well.

[00:23:44] Interviewer: Mikiko, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what happens when something that you design and create isn't able to be seen, like in this time that we're in, what it's like for a set designer in an era where more and more productions are going to start being streamed?

[00:24:06] Mikiko: No, it's a very hard question. [laughs] But because it's very, very difficult, I myself lost 11 of my shows for this pandemic. 4 of those 11 is saying they are trying to postpone, like producers. But who knows when we can come back to theater physically. This is the time I think culture shift, I think. One of my friend who is a set designer once said, "I'm going to TV world because poor people watch TV. Poor people doesn't go theater." A theater is becoming a quite privileged thing and then expensive thing. That is some truth there too. I'm a theater maker and I believe in live storytelling so that I will try to stay as long as I can possibly.

My hometown, Kobe in Japan, was hit at 7.2 earthquake in 1995. Then I was a young, actually student at the University of Washington as ESL. I was just learning English and then I couldn't find my parents for 48 hours. When I went back, to work for help to get the people's life back, I was young and I didn't have anything to lose. I could do it. I thought my dream to work in theater is silly, because theater and art is not helping people's lives or immediate. That's what I thought, but eventually, people wanted to gather, and then theater people, backstage people created the temporary stage, and then stars, famous comedians came to be on stage and bring back the laughter or togetherness to the city. We didn't have electricity long time so that we had a bonfire and then people just tell their bravery stories and then drink and laugh. I really feel like that experience made me to really strongly believing in what I do.

I might be too romantic but world is not going to be stay like this and then it's going to move and then yes, like one or two years where I don't know, seven years, I don't know how long does it take but it's going to shift and move and then something new will come. We have to have laughter and we have to find beauty in any situation we live in, even when we lose electricity.

I want to be a skilled person without electricity. [laughs] I am optimistic and I don't know how long does it take for people to gather but when people gather, we tell each other's story or even not. We are telling each other the story here.

[00:27:42] Jon-Barrett: When we go back to whatever normal becomes, the live theater needs, it's essential in my opinion. I'm a stage actor. I need it. Personally, I need that interaction. Is this shifting to open this space to make live theater more accessible through streaming options? Does that take away or does it bring more attention to live theater?

[00:28:11] Jeanne: Well, that's an interesting question. I remember that the show, New York Show was actually taped previous to theater works by a digital platform company in New York. The idea was that they would stream it on their website in a pay-per-view model. It never came to pass because there were some administrative shifts that happened. I do remember the discussions about would this benefit the play or would it hurt it.

There were many other discussions by other organizations going on at the time about streaming plays. The main thing I heard was that it never really hurt anyone. It actually amplified interest in productions that people saw in a streaming capacity and then wanted to experience live. That's where the discussion was left when I last was tuning into it, that the streaming opportunities for theater plays were actually good ones in the mind of many producers because as Mikiko said, theater can be quite exclusive. A lot of people don't even initially start out as theatergoers because it has that reputation for being expensive and out of reach to a lot of people who can't afford it. People aren't aware that oftentimes there are initiatives to make theater more affordable, especially to students and young people, and outreach initiatives that are going on so that people who can't afford the theater can actually see theater and be sponsored by various groups. I think streaming is ultimately a very good thing for the theater.

[00:30:13] Mikiko: Something like Hold These Truths, it's so amazing if we can make the story heard as many people as possible. I teared up by listening to a story today and 10 years ago. That's unfortunate, actually because it's so relevant now. As theatre maker, and then who worked on the show, it's so wonderful to work so many times for this show. Every time we do it, we teared up, and then it so feel present. That present feeling, the story. Then that's our society really is. It's a wonderful story.

[00:30:59] Jon-Barrett: It's hard to hear it when a lot hasn't changed.

[00:31:06] Jeanne: Yes. I can hear it in this anti-Asian environment that we're in right now with hate crimes and hostilities against not just Asian Americans, or-- it's just infected the air all around us. Anybody who is "different" and it is really terrifying. I try and remind myself that someone like Gordon felt all those things and even more so because as we were saying, before, this was pre-civil rights. He didn't have that bedrock of history to stand on. He really did not know what was going to happen to him. That's why his mother was so frightened for him. She had no idea what they would do to him for defying these orders.

[00:31:59] Jonelle: As we wrap up our conversation today about TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, what else do we need to know, either about your particular theatre company that you work with? Or about any theatre company?

[00:32:10] Jeffrey: Well, I think if I'm thinking about any theatre company, and any small business, I think that it's easy for us to see a large theatre space and pretty much all of these theatre companies are small businesses. I was listening to a David Chang podcast the other day, and he was talking about the restaurant industry. It really reminded me that during this time, where everyone has had to shift how they do their business, be it restaurants, arts organizations, entertainment, movie theaters. Just try to-- If you have the means to find ways to support them, go buy a book at a local bookshop, go get some takeout at a local restaurants and bring home.

Think about the arts organizations that you attend or support, be it a theatre company, a dance company, a museum, because all of these arts organizations that are all nonprofits, and they're all really in need of support. If you can, I know money is hard for everyone, but if you have the means, I'd really encourage everyone to consider supporting these organizations to make sure that we get out on the other end of this and are able to get back to the work that we're doing because I think it's really important.

[00:33:26] Jon-Barrett: We want to thank Jeffrey Lo, Jeanne Sakata, and Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams. For more information, visit theatreworks.org, holdthesetruths.info, and mikikosmacadams.com. Chapters Podcast was produced by Heritage Future and made possible with support from Chapman University and California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Libraries. For more information visit heritagefuture.org, chapman.edu, and library.ca.gov.