Theater Review: Block 8
By Dan Nailen
02/20/09 - 09:34 AM
I graduated from both high school and college in Utah and never was taught about the history of Japanese internment camps in Utah.
As a result, my first reaction to Block 8, Plan-B Theatre Company's new production, is one of thankfulness. Granted, the 70-minute play penned by Utahn Matthew Ivan Bennett doesn't delve much into the bureaucratic decision-making that led to the establishment of camps in places like Topaz, outside Delta, and Moab. But it does powerfully take the audience inside the experience of both the Japanese-Americans forced to leave their homes for dusty, desolate camps in the desert, and the experience of Americans trying to come to grips with being attacked, seemingly out of the blue, by a foreign country.
The parallels Bennett draws between America post-Pearl Harbor and America post-9/11 might be obvious, but that doesn't make them any less potent. As absurd as it seems that the U.S. government would take patriotic Americans and force them into camps during WWII, based simply on a shared ethnicity with those attacking Pearl Harbor, we've clearly done the same thing in modern times. Only this time our government, at least under the Bush administration, based its dismissal of many Americans' civil rights on a shared religion with the terrorists responsible for taking down the Twin Towers.
In Block 8, Bennett tells the story of the Topaz experience through two characters, on a simple set that makes his dialogue all the more powerful in its delivery. Bryan Kido plays Ken, the eldest son of a Japanese family from California forced to live in the Utah desert. Ken had to leave UC Berkeley after three years to move to the camp, and his intellectual curiosity in matters of religion and politics doesn't stop simply because of the change of locale.
Indeed, he ends up meeting Ada (Anita Booher) when he visits a camp library, and an unlikely friendship develops between the young man and the Mormon woman who evolves from a fearful American who sees the camps as a completely reasonable response to Pearl Harbor into a skeptic of her government's policies. Of course, the fact that her own son is serving in the Pacific Rim colors her point of view.
The play flies by in a series of striking conversations between the odd couple. Ken veers from angry to amused, always questioning how a democracy can treat his family as if they were part of the forces that struck at Pearl Harbor, rather than as active, patriotic Americans. And Ada's own education is more dramatic, and the role still manages to help educate the audience about the pervasive attitudes of Americans who had no reason to distrust their own government, despite its appalling and racist decision to form the internment camps.
The performances of Kido and Booher are both solid, and director Jerry Rapier makes the most of a simple set, some film clips, sound effects and dramatic lighting. There are only about 100 tickets left for the show's run; visit the Plan-B Web site for available show dates.
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Reader Comments:
So Dan,
How long were your parents internment camps? Is it true that's where you were born?
Your buddy,
Jeff
Thank You for this great review -- I certainly will be going to this -- My mother was in a camp in Heart Mountain Wyoming and was in 30 below zero weather - coming from Los Angeles California - they were not prepared for this kind of weather - my Father served in the 442 the all Japanese American unit -- Can you even imagine - the children of today fighting for a country that has your family - with guns pointing - behind barbed wire ???