Playwright and actor Hiro Kanagawa says it’s “sad and remarkable” how relevant his play “Forgiveness” has become since it premiered over two years ago in Vancouver and Calgary.
An adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s 2014 memoir, the play — which is currently on at the Stratford Festival in a brand new production — focuses on two of Sakamoto’s grandparents.
After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, his paternal grandmother, Mitsue Sakamoto, was uprooted with her family and forced to relocate from their stable Vancouver home to work in rural Alberta, having lost all their possessions.
Meanwhile, Sakamoto’s maternal grandfather, Ralph MacLean, who grew up in the tranquil Magdalen Islands in Eastern Canada, joined the Canadian Army and ended up thousands of miles away suffering at the hands of the Japanese in a Hong Kong prisoner-of-war camp.
“During that first production, coming out of COVID-19, there was a spate of anti-Asian hate crimes and, for those of us in the production who were of Asian descent, it really made the play poignant and urgent,” said Kanagawa in a Zoom call from Stratford, a few days before the show’s first preview.
“And now, two years later, we find ourselves in a situation where we’re hearing the same anti-immigrant arguments being used against people in the United States to deport them. In Canada, too, there are people with the same sentiments who have been emboldened by what’s happening there. So it’s a sad reminder of how relevant this story remains.”
Kanagawa, a well-known actor (“Shogun,” “The X-Files”) and playwright (his play “Indian Arm” won the Governor General’s Award in 2017) first heard about “Forgiveness” during CBC’s Canada Reads competition, where the book, championed by Jeanne Beker, eventually won. He was moved by the story but knew that turning it into a play would be a challenge. The book spans decades and criss-crosses the globe.
He found a way into the material and its characters by seeing parallel scenes of buried pain and resurfaced trauma experienced by both grandparents.
“Mark had included these two instances of human frailty in people who had shown tremendous grace and courage,” Kanagawa said. “And that somehow let me see how I could turn this story into a piece of theatre.”
While Sakamoto himself is a character in the memoir, especially in the final third, he doesn’t show up in the play.
“The story was so big and there are so many characters, I couldn’t find a way to work Mark’s story into the pre-war and wartime story of Mitsue and Ralph,” said Kanagawa. But there is a reference to him near the end of the play that he hopes audiences find moving.
The playwright has made major changes to the script; a recent second printing of the published play reflects the Stratford production.
“As an actor, I have a keen understanding of the collaborative nature of the art form, and actors often ignore stage directions and punctuation,” he said, laughing. “It’s not useful to be precious about the words. But it’s also a testament to the collaborative spirit that Stafford (Arima, who’s directing) creates not only for me but for all of the artists involved. We’re always bouncing ideas around, trying to make the story and characters clearer.”
Arima, who co-commissioned the play (with Vancouver’s Arts Club) for Theatre Calgary, where he’s artistic director, is excited about the challenge of staging “Forgiveness” at the Tom Patterson Theatre, with its signature thrust stage.
“It’s such a beautiful space — it’s like a runway,” said Arima on the same Zoom call. “There’s an abstractness and impressionistic energy about the theatre because of its elongated stage and the fact that you have people sitting on three sides. That kind of forces you to be creative. What’s great is Hiro’s adaptation is in many ways abstract and impressionistic. We’ve been able to find ways to keep the story alive and interesting and full of surprises.”
While Kanagawa was born in Japan and immigrated to Canada with his family in the 1960s, Arima has a personal connection to the internment camps. His father is Japanese-Canadian (his mother is Chinese-Canadian), and several relatives on his father’s side experienced displacement and relocation first-hand.
When, a decade ago on Broadway, he directed the George Takei-Lea Salonga musical “Allegiance,” about the experience of Japanese-Americans interned during the war, he sat down with his aunts and uncles to hear about their experiences, but ultimately decided he didn’t want to reopen any wounds.
Both he and Kanagawa see “Forgiveness” as more than a show about the war. It’s about what forgiveness means today — especially now, when society feels so divided and filled with anger.
“Hiro, the cast and I have had so many conversations about forgiveness,” said Arima. “The moral of the story isn’t that you forgive and forget. You can move through the pain. But you can’t forget or ignore it. The question is: how do you not pass this anger, resentment, hurt and pain onto the next generation?”
Kanagawa agrees. On the first day of rehearsals at Stratford, he recalled author Sakamoto saying that forgiveness wasn’t a single event; it was a continuing process.
“You might forgive something today, but a month or year from now, you may have to go through that process again. I think that’s a valuable lesson.”
Kanagawa recalls one older white man coming up to him after a performance of the play in Calgary.
“He said he thought he was going to be in for ‘two-and-a-half hours of white guilt,’ and was thankful that that’s not what happened,” said Kanagawa.
“There’s the perception that this play is a Japanese-Canadian internment play and is going to be very grim. But that’s not the whole story. First and foremost, it’s a Canadian play. And all of Canada can appreciate and be proud of what this country has and what it represents, and can heal from that. That’s my hope.”
“Forgiveness” runs until Sept. 27 at the Tom Patterson Theatre, 111 Lakeside Dr., Stratford, Ont. Visit stratfordfestival.ca or call 1-800-567-1600 for tickets and more information.
