“Once he realized how absurd that was, he couldn’t obey the curfew anymore. “He was actually intending to go along with the orders right up until he went to the fairgrounds near Seattle (where internees were being rounded up) and saw the barbed wire, and saw the horse stalls that they were putting the families into.”Įarlier, Hirabayashi had even made peace with an evening curfew placed on Japanese-Americans, “until he suddenly realized he was an American citizen running back to obey an 8 o’clock curfew, and the international students who weren’t American citizens were free to be at the library as late as they wanted. “It was a gradual realization - a real journey of enlightenment. “He didn’t start out with those convictions, which is why I love his story so much,” the playwright says. To hear Sakata tell it, though, Gordon Hirabayashi hardly had designs on becoming a fierce defender of the Constitution. She adds: “I think now, in 2019, (the play) speaks more powerfully than maybe it ever has in the 12 years we’ve been doing it.” Sakata perceives alarming parallels to Hirabayashi’s story in such matters as the controversy over border detention camps, the travel restrictions on people from several Muslim-majority countries and what she sees as an attitude of “encouraging people to think in racist terms toward people who are immigrants.” “But what we couldn’t have predicted is that every year since then, the play has become more and more immediately relevant.” “We hoped people would find it fascinating and inspiring. “We wanted people to know about Gordon’s story, which is very much like that of Rosa Parks, in his principled defiance of a racist order. “When we first did the play in 2007 at East West Players (in Los Angeles), we were thinking it was a play that would shine a light on a little-known corner of American history,” she says. And to Sakata, it speaks to the contemporary cultural landscape in ways she couldn’t have quite imagined when “Hold These Truths” premiered.
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