Tales of Clamor
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
PULLProject Ensemble
Through March 3
Tales of Clamor, currently having its world premiere at the Aratani Theatre Black Box in Little Tokyo, takes on the deeply emotional subject of Japanese-American internment camps in the early 1940s. As terrible as the current spectacle of Mexican children being ripped from the arms of their parents and locked up in cages is, how much worse was it to have American citizens uprooted from their homes, from their lives, and transported to concentration camps in this country for no other reason than their heritage.
Following the Japanese bombings at Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration put out some curt (and unverified) explanation about “Japanese-American spies.” That was a pretext. The fact is, this mass incarceration was an abomination, unjustified and unjustifiable, and the name Manzanar (the most infamous of the ten camps, right here in California) should be branded in every American’s mind as a source of shame and dishonor.
That has not became clear in the heated discussion following this play, when a nicely dressed, white-haired couple expressed shock that such an event had actually happened. “When I was growing up in Michigan in the ’50s, we were never taught anything about this in American history,” the woman claimed. Other white people in the audience seemed to have been aware that such barbed-wire enclosures existed, but little more than that — despite the efforts of George Takei (who was himself interned in Manzanar) and many other prominent Japanese-Americans to keep memories of this war crime at the forefront.
It is this historical and generational obscurity that the show’s creative team — principal writer Traci Kato-Kiriyama, director Dan Kwong and the PULLProject Ensemble — want to examine. At the beginning of the evening, Kato-Kiriyama, playing the lead character Kem, tells the audience, “We have heard enough about the Tales of Silence regarding these terrible events. But silence itself can become a deafening noise over time. I want to find these Tales of Clamor.”
Kem is inspired to search for these “tales” by the spirit of her grandfather and the indignities he suffered at the hands of white Americans. Kem herself is a theater artist, who creates performance pieces in partnership with Eddie (Kennedy Kabasaras), a trapeze artist who displays remarkable gymnastic skills in the course of the show. But Eddie is a Filipino-American, and the crises of the Japanese-American community doesn’t have any particular resonance for him. He eventually agrees to work with Kem on this because he trusts her creative instincts and the “interesting journeys” that have resulted from them.
This then becomes a “process play” — meaning that Kem and Eddie’s journey into this subject matter becomes the play that we see. As such, it only occasionally feels successful in dramatic terms, developing instead into a series of disparate threads. In one, Kem interviews relatives of camp prisoners and an actual victim of the camps (Takayo Tsubouchi Fischer, who was indeed interned in a camp between the ages of 9-12). In another, she discusses what she’s discovered with Eddie. Then there are her monologues, delivered to the audience, as well as scenes that display Eddie’s prowess on the trapeze. One big problem is that there isn’t any antagonist, given Eddie’s minimal emotional investment. As a result, he becomes just a convenient sounding board, enabling Kem to articulate her conclusions without these arising from any real conflict.
Late in the performance piece, clips are shown from the fiery 1981 hearings in California into the question of reparations for victims of the internment camps. The clips are projected onto the huge screen at the rear of the stage, and we finally see the true “Tales of Clamor” emerge, as Japanese-American survivors of the camps rail against the U.S. government, with one dark-haired man vowing, “We have deferred too much to white people! Starting today, this is over!” At the same time, Eddie, deftly lit by Pete Thornbury, is executing a series of brilliant moves on the trapeze, all to the haunting original music of Howard Ho (his music is a highlight, remarkably evocative throughout).
Suddenly the show springs to vivid theatrical life, as all these separate threads come together into a tragic statement that needs no explanation. We feel the pain of the victims, we feel the violation that has been perpetrated against them in the name of protecting democracy. And we understand the dignity and self-discipline of the Japanese-American community as they try to come to terms with an atrocity committed upon them by their own country, a country they love.
This is what the entire evening could be, instead of the episodic, meandering series of scenes that it currently is. Here’s hoping this is not the end of the “process,” and that there is more to come.
The Aratani Black Box Theatre at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, 244 S. San Pedro St., Downtown L.A.—Little Tokyo; Fri.-Sat. & Mon., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; through Mar. 3. (213) 680-3700 or JACCC.org. Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission.
