Internment-camp life has resonance today

After a while, the children forgot what life had been like before the camps. When they played house, they formed lines as though waiting for food in the mess hall, rather than pretend to cook for themselves.

That’s just one anecdote from a new documentary theater piece about the roundup and incarceration of Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but it reanimates history with breathtaking immediacy. More stories like it are collected in “Question 27, Question 28,” presented as a concert reading at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles.

The presentation opened Thursday on the 62nd anniversary of executive order 9066, which -- a couple of months after that “date which will live in infamy,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt described it -- set internment in motion. Compiled by playwright Chay Yew (“Porcelain,” “A Language of Their Own”) from oral history collections, interviews and memoirs and other published works, the piece describes what happened to more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. The title refers to loyalty issues posed on a government questionnaire.

“I was red, white and blue when I was growing up,” one woman recalls. “I taught Sunday school and was very, very American.” That got overlooked after the Japanese attack on America.

Events bear an eerie resemblance to actions against Jews in Hitler’s Germany. They also call to mind the treatment of people of Middle Eastern descent here in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

This is among Yew’s goals, achieved subtly yet vividly in this piece that he also directed for the Mark Taper Forum’s Asian Theatre Workshop, in association with the Japanese American National Museum and East West Players.

The reading is presented in an open, central hall by four actresses -- Dian Kobayashi, Emily Kuroda, Tamlyn Tomita and Shannon Holt -- who are dressed in black and positioned at music stands, reading from the script. Behind them hangs a banner imprinted with magnified strands of barbed wire.

Yew has focused on stories as told by women, a perspective that quickly drives home the idea that whole families were forced from their homes and shipped first to assembly centers, then to hastily constructed camps in remote, often inhospitable inland locations. Internees had no privacy; they were forever covered in dust.

Still, girls continued to put their hair up at night. Weddings took place. Gardens were planted. Crepe-paper flowers were fashioned to pretty things up.

Faith in America’s constitutional principles was tested, but patriotism burned alongside the resentment and anger. As one woman states: “I thought maybe this was the way we could show our love for our country.”

In this first, simple presentation, the dozens of overlapping stories are easy to lose track of, and at two hours and 20 minutes, the performance is too long for an audience seated uncomfortably on folding chairs.

Still, the people -- everyone from young, Japanese American mothers to uncomprehending Caucasians outside -- come alive, recalling a history that should not be forgotten and declaring, as one internee so simply yet eloquently states it: “I am going to prevail.”

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‘Question 27, Question 28’

Where: Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., downtown L.A.

When: Today, 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.; Friday and next Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 29, 3 and 7:30 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 29

Price: $10

Contact: (213) 625-0414, Ext. 2237

Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes