Forgiveness hits human note in moving exploration of Japanese internment during Second World War

Yoshie Bancroft, Griffin Cork in Forgiveness. Photo: Moonrider Productions.

Reality intersected fiction this weekend on stages in Calgary and Edmonton, when Forgiveness received its world premiere at the same time one of the characters in the play was honoured with a Juno Award.

Onstage at Theatre Calgary Friday night was the memorable, moving world premiere of author Mark Sakamoto's award-winning memoir Forgiveness, a drama that explores the traumas that the Second World War inflicted on everyone, with a focus on the internment of Japanese-Canadians alongside the inhumane treatment of Canadian soldiers at the hands of the Japanese.

Early in the show there's a flash forward to 1968 in Medicine Hat, where the Sakamoto family - Mitsue (Yoshie Bancroft) son Pat (Daniel Fong), and patriarch Hideo (Kevin Takahide Lee) - are busy because adult son Ron (Isaac Li), a local music promoter, is bringing over a travelling band to eat after the show.

"What band?" asks Mitsue.

"Guess Who," says Ron.

"I don't know," Mitsue says. "Who?"

"Guess Who!"

It was a cute variation of a famous Abbott and Costello routine – Who's on first? – and of course references one of Canada's most iconic bands, so there was no confusion for the audience at Max Bell Theatre as to which prairie rockers Ron was referring to.

But for Albertans, it was also a nod to a real guy, 80-year-old Ron Sakamoto, who brought rock-and-roll to Medicine Hat and Lethbridge for more than five decades – and who was honoured for it Saturday night up in Edmonton, when he received a special Juno Award for his contributions to Canadian music.

There are a few meta moments like that in Forgiveness, which starts out in Vancouver's Chinatown district, before commuting to Coaldale, alternating back and forth between Hong Kong, a Japanese prison camp – and the Magdalen Islands in Atlantic Canada, where Ralph (Griffin Cork, in a powerhouse performance) narrates that more Canadian boys from the Magdalens died in combat per capita than anywhere else in Canada.

It’s a sprawling story that features two distinct energy levels: before and after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbour.

Before, pretty young Mitsue (Bancroft), gets hired by a Japanese-Canadian dress shop owner on Granville Street, where she is spied by Hideo, who woos her - and wins her hand, despite mom and dad’s best efforts to arrange her wedding like they do in the old country, which Mitsue wants nothing to do with.

Yoshie Bancroft in Forgiveness. Photo: Moonrider Productions.

For Mitsue’s generation of Japanese-Canadian teens, it’s all about enjoying the newfound freedoms afforded to Canadian kids that their parents’ generation never got to experience - and any attempts to remove them are apt to produce a rebellion.

Meanwhile over in the Magdalens, and then in Gander, Ralph and his two buddies, Cooper (Fionn Laird) and Adams (Jacob Leonard), are three ordinary teenage Canadian boys: dreamers who long to escape their parents’ old and - in the case of Ralphie's angry, alcoholic dad - abusive ways to see the world and get some good bar stories.

It's familiar stuff and that's another way of saying it's all a bit boring, in that way that Canadian lives often are lucky and idyllic – and hopeful.

And then, it's 1941, and Pearl Harbour happens, and reality for all these teenagers turns into a horror movie from which there seems to be no escape.

That means the same Japanese-Canadian teenagers who were in love with their Canadian freedoms are now targets as Canada enters a war where the Japanese are the new heels, and that includes Japanese-Canadians who find themselves convenient scapegoats for it all.

There are protesters on the streets hollering to keep Canada white and calling for all Japanese residents to be expelled from the country - which also might open up the B.C. fishing industry, which Japanese-Canadian fishermen such as Mitsue's father have grown to dominate.

Meanwhile, Ralph and his pals find themselves under siege in Hong Kong, where tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers unleash the dogs of war, taking thousands of them prisoner in brutal conditions.

The safe, predictable coming-of-age in 1940s Western Canada gets replaced by a story that’s teeming with hatred, anger, chaos, violence, death and, most of all, trauma that isn’t limited to a race or gender.

Mitsue and Hideo find themselves interned along with Mitsue’s parents in a chicken coop, first in B.C. and then in a barn in Coaldale, where they work picking sugar beets for pennies as the war unfolds.

All of it plays out on a simple, elegantly-designed set (by Pam Johnson) that changes through projected animation and video images (well-designed by Cindy Mochizuki) that propel us around the world and back in time.

There are lots of terrific performances, including Cork as Ralphie, Bancroft's Mitsue, Fong, Lee, Jerod Blake and Jovanni Sy.

Griffin Cork in Forgiveness. (Photo courtesy Theatre Calgary/Moonrider Productions)

As it unfolds, Forgiveness also reveals that underneath all that shimmering violence and hate, there’s also a glimmer of humanity lurking in these characters.

The climax is a dinner between Ralph McLean’s family and Mitsue’s family in 1968, when their children Pat (Fong) and Diane (Allison Lynch) have fallen in love.

It’s a dinner party fraught with emotional landmines laid by those war year traumas and here, Kanagawa’s script hits its highest notes.

All of which goes to show you - reality might be more fun when things are going great, but theatre works best when a lot of damaged people are trying their hardest not to push each other’s emotionally traumatized buttons.

Theatre Calgary artistic director Stafford Arima, whose relatives lived through the internment, directs Forgiveness with velocity and fluidity, managing the parallel stories through a series of overlapping transitions that feel seamless.

Theatre Calgary artistic director Stafford Arima (Photo courtesy Theatre Calgary)

He's helped by Kanagawa's script and the fine ensemble cast, which find ways to locate their shared humanity even when they find themselves in terrible, inhumane circumstances.

The final scene comes when the two worlds of Mitsue and Ralphie merge into one, in a way that feels organic and quintessentially Canadian.

Forgiveness arrives at a moment when hard feelings and hatred appear to be making a comeback around the world. It delivers an entertaining, heartfelt message about how it doesn't have to stay that way – that, as improbable as it may have seemed back in 1941, sometimes, a Sakamoto ends up with his name engraved on a Juno.

And another Sakamoto, Mark, ends up writing a beautiful memoir about it all that gets turned into a drama that digs into some of the darkest moments of Canadian history and finds a few little slivers of light.

Forgiveness is at the Max Bell through April 1 is a co-production of Theatre Calgary and the Vancouver Arts Club.

Update: Due to illness, Wednesday's performance of Forgiveness has been cancelled.