A Postwar Battle at Home
Sam Hurwitt Sunday, March 18, 2007
It's the middle of the afternoon on a recent Thursday, and Sala Iwamatsu is making a scene. Or rather, the creative team for American Conservatory Theater's world premiere of "After the War" is remaking a scene, and Iwamatsu is in the thick of it. This is the scene that's supposed to solidify the relationship between jazz musician-turned-boarding- house-manager Chester Monkawa and Iwamatsu's character Lillian Okamura, and it hasn't been taking shape the way it should. Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda has come into the rehearsal with new pages that fill in some of the backstory about each character's experiences in the Japanese American internment camps during World War II, and about the death in combat of Chester's brother, to whom Lillian was engaged.
Set in San Francisco's Japantown circa 1948, "After the War" explores some of the tension between the Japanese Americans returning to the neighborhood after being rounded up into internment camps during the war and the African Americans who had moved into the area from the South to pursue wartime job opportunities in the meantime. It also touches on how the "no-no boys" who had protested being treated as an enemy by their own country were shunned by those who had "gone along to get along."
The ACT rehearsal hall is filled with a stationary approximation of the rotating set that will be used in the show, with sheets of paper taped to the surrounding walls indicating which room of the set is visible from that vantage point. Artistic Director Carey Perloff, who commissioned and is directing the new Gotanda play, circles the set to get the audience's perspective as scenes change.
This is the first time hearing the new lines aloud, and sentences are still being crossed out and penciled in with every read-through. Gotanda and dramaturge Michael Paller are conferring about whether Chester should refer to himself as a "Japanese American no-no boy" or a "nisei no-no boy" when he talks about refusing to take a loyalty oath. Some of the new exposition sticks, and some is soon discarded.
"Are you married to him throwing himself on a grenade?" says Hiro Kanagawa, who plays Chester.
Everyone laughs, and Gotanda replies, "No, not at all." "It's changed so much," Iwamatsu explained just before going to rehearsal as she neglected her sandwich, self-conscious about eating it while talking. "I think my character used to be married to the leading man, and they got rid of that story line, but they kept a lot of the scenes the same. So I just came off very 'wifey,' always nagging. The last few days have totally changed the way I have to approach the character. I think it works, though. I don't think any guy would fall in love with me if I was yelling at him like that all the time."
This is the New Jersey actress' first show at ACT, but her third role in a Gotanda play. (Professionally, at least -- she also performed in a student production of his musical "The Avocado Kid.") She played the title role in his "Ballad of Yachiyo" at Berkeley Rep in 1995, which then went on to South Coast Rep and New York's Public Theater, then stepped into 1999's "Sisters Matsumoto" at San Jose Rep as a replacement and continued the role in Boston. Both of those world premiere productions were directed by former Berkeley Rep Artistic Director Sharon Ott. The first co-starred Sab Shimono, who also appears in "After the War," as landlord Mr. Goto, and the second was also set among former internees after World War II. In "Sisters," Iwamatsu also had a fiance who died in the war. That's what you call bad luck.
"Yeah, I know," she said, laughing. "Don't get married to me!"
Iwamatsu's acquaintance with both Gotanda and Shimono goes back much farther than those previous productions, to her childhood at East West Players in Los Angeles. Her father, the single-named Mako -- who died in July - was the founding artistic director of East West Players, the first Asian American repertory company. Gotanda's first play, "The Avocado Kid," premiered there in 1978.
Shimono, who co-starred with Mako in Stephen Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures" on Broadway in 1976, is a veteran of many East West productions, including a 2004 production of Gotanda's "The Wind Cries Mary."
"I was 3 or 4 when I started working at East West Players," Iwamatsu recalled. "That was in 'A Doll's House.' I was always at the theater. I would sleep in the dressing room or help out at the box office or sell coffee -- because if I worked at concessions, they knew I'd make more money than an adult."
Iwamatsu didn't so much become an actor as she never stopped being one. She worked at the theater all through high school, and after brief stints at UCLA and CalArts, she joined the Broadway cast of "Miss Saigon" and never looked back, going on to replacement roles in "Rent" and "Avenue Q."
"My parents were so different," she said. "They'd keep me home from school so that I could do my show. I don't know how I passed. They were like, 'Go ahead, go try drugs, go try sex -- it's good for your acting! You'll be a better actress if you learn how to suffer in life.' Everything was about your craft. I don't think I'm as gung ho about it as they are." Working on the Gotanda postwar plays has been a learning experience for Iwamatsu, because the Japanese American internment camps were pretty much skipped over in her history classes when she was growing up, and her own family hadn't been part of it.
Her mother's family was still in Japan, as was her father, who didn't come to the United States until 1948, when he was 15. Mako's parents, had already moved to the United States -- but to the East Coast, while the internment was concentrated on the West Coast.
"His parents had been in prison in Japan because they were very politically active, and that's where my father was born," Iwamatsu said. "They went to the United States, and they studied art here and started to work for the OSS. My grandfather would draw pictures for propaganda flyers, and my grandmother would do recordings telling Japanese women to go against the war effort." (See sidebar.)
Though Mako would go on to earn Oscar and Tony nominations and create opportunities for many Asian American theater artists, his first claim to fame was one of circumstance.
"My father ended up being the first Japanese national allowed into the United States after the war," Iwamatsu says. "I had no idea until just a few years ago, when I found a picture and he said, 'Oh yeah, that's when I came.' But that's the funny thing about Japanese American culture -- you don't talk about your past that much. I think that's why so many people don't know about the internment camps, because it shamed them so much. Other cultures would be like, 'This is what happened. This is injustice!' But Japanese people don't say that. Even though he was here for so long, he was very Japanese that way."
After the War starts previews Thurs., opens March 28 and runs through April 22 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. $12-$80. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org.
Sam Hurwitt is a freelance writer.
This article appeared on page PK - 22 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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