Family’s survival story
A mother awakes to find her family covered in dust. Worry furrows her face as she contemplates how gray and gritty their lives suddenly have become.
Post-Pearl Harbor, she and 11 family members have been incarcerated at Manzanar. The wind seems to blow ceaselessly in this part of Inyo County. The thin, pine-plank walls, covered with tarpaper, are no match for it.
“We can’t live like this,” she finally says to one of her sons. “Animals live like this.”
“We’ll make it better, Mama,” he assures her. “You watch.”
This family’s story, recounted in the memoir “Farewell to Manzanar,” is emblematic of what happened to more than 110,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens forcibly relocated to camps after the Japanese attack on America. It is told from the perspective of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was 7 at the time of her family’s internment. Written with her husband, James D. Houston, and published in 1973, the book has become a reading staple among middle school and high school students.
More than 4,000 students have seen a stage version developed through Cornerstone Theater Company’s Literature to Life program. Public performances will be offered Nov. 30 through Dec. 3.
The 67-minute adaptation, by Cynthia Gates Fujikawa, is given a spare, elegant, at times stylized staging by Christopher Liam Moore. The wind’s ever-present moan is part of the soundscape, as is the mournful wail of a clarinet. Page Leong and Leslie Ishii play all the roles, with Leong narrating and portraying young Jeanne while Ishii plays, most prominently, the mother.
Tall strands of barbed wire hem in the playing area. The abstracted set, by Shigeru Yaji, is built mostly of raw wood, suggesting the structures’ makeshift quality. The family’s arrival is presaged by a slide show depicting the anti-Japanese mood of early 1942, including a photo of a “hunting license” for Japanese that was someone’s idea of a joke.
Yet no matter how grim the situation (the toilets of the women’s latrine backing up and erupting like “tiny volcanoes” being one particularly vivid example), the writing never loses its sense of humor. When internees are issued too-large military-surplus clothing, the narration wryly observes: “We were a band of Charlie Chaplins marooned in the California desert.”
Jeanne’s memories of her father are particularly poignant. He arrives at the camp a shattered man after FBI incarceration in Bismarck, N.D., where he’d been questioned about 50-gallon drums on his boat that held not fuel to supply enemy submarines, as suspected, but fishing chum.
He is depicted by a bunraku-style puppet with graying hair and a suit slightly too big for his emaciated frame (design by Lynn Jeffries). Leong supplies his gravelly, gruff voice as he swings his cane -- lashing out, but at the wrong people: his family. When liberation finally comes, he takes flight with poetical weightlessness -- an image that encapsulates this simple yet powerful presentation.
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‘Farewell to Manzanar’
Where: National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, 111 N. Central Ave., L.A.
When: 7 p.m. Nov. 30 and Dec. 1-2; 2 p.m. Dec. 3
Ends: Dec. 3
Price: $15
Contact: (213) 625-0414
Running time: 1 hour, 7 minutes
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