STRATFORD — “Forgiveness,” a new stage adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s Canada Reads-winning memoir of the same name, is a work unabashedly forthright with its intentions. Its title is its theme, its morals and its guiding virtue. It’s also the feeling that playwright Hiro Kanagawa wants so keenly for his audience to embrace as they walk out of his two-act historical drama.
This play, however, tests one’s capacity for forgiveness in all the wrong ways. Because whether you enjoy “Forgiveness” ultimately hinges, ironically, on how much of that virtue you’re willing to extend to it — a work based on a story so important and so tender, yet told in a way that almost entirely squanders its heart.
Can such a flawed adaptation ever be forgiven?
One of the most surprising differences between this play and its source material is that Kanagawa completely erases Sakamoto as the memoir’s narrator. That choice is confounding. While the memoir is primarily focused on Sakamoto’s maternal grandfather, Ralph, and paternal grandmother, Mitsue, and their painful experiences during the Second World War, he’s the glue that binds their stories together. He’s the product of their forgiveness.
Instead, Kanagawa frames his adaptation as a memory play, told from the perspective of Ralph (Jeff Lillico) and Mitsue (Yoshie Bancroft). Sometimes together on stage, sometimes alone, they recount stories of their lives during the war, through to the meeting of their children, Stan (Douglas Oyama) and Diane (Allison Lynch), who would bring their families together.
Ralph, who hails from the Magdalen Islands on the East Coast, enlists in the army to escape his abusive father. But after he’s sent off to fight in Hong Kong, he soon finds himself as a prisoner of war, held captive by the Japanese. He witnesses starvation, torture and death. Things thought unimaginable are his daily reality. And when he’s miraculously freed at the end of the war, Ralph returns home only to be haunted by his memories and left to reckon with his guilt. Why did he survive, he constantly asks himself, when so many of his friends had perished?
Meanwhile, Mitsue and her husband Hideo (Michael Man) face their own set of battles in British Columbia. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, their Japanese-Canadian community is confronted with hostility, framed as the enemy within their homeland. Mitsue’s father (played by Kanagawa) has his fishing boat confiscated. Shortly afterward, the family is interned and sent off to Alberta. Their lives upended, barred from returning to the coasts of B.C., they spend years labouring on the harsh Prairie fields.
While both Ralph’s and Mitsue’s stories serve as parables of forgiveness, they’re more than merely about forgiving “the other.” At their core, they’re also tales about forgiving oneself.
Kanagawa, however, presents them in a way that blunts their emotional impact, taking an already-disjointed memoir only to slice and dice it even further. Without a single narrator to render some semblance of focus to the action, the drama plays out on a twin-tracked narrative, wildly skipping to and fro between time periods and perspectives. It’s only in the play’s final scene when its parallel storylines finally come together.
Lorenzo Savoini’s period costumes help to distinguish among the various eras. So too do Cindy Mochizuki’s expressionistic animations and Sammy Chien’s gorgeous projection designs, some of this production’s few highlights. Director Stafford Arima also manages to conjure up some inspired moments in his staging.
Still, he too often misuses the Tom Patterson Theatre’s elongated thrust, seemingly dividing the space into two (using Kaileigh Krysztofiak’s lighting), with Mitsue’s scenes mostly taking place upstage and Ralph’s playing out downstage. In his memoir, Sakamoto states that his grandparents always avoided comparing their traumas during the Second World War. Both experienced pain, yet their journeys were incomparable. But Arima’s frequent visual juxtaposition of their stories, with vignettes sometimes occurring simultaneously, makes it all but impossible to avoid drawing those comparisons.
On the whole, Kanagawa’s script is overstuffed and overlong. (That’s in spite of an unfortunate medical emergency in the audience on opening night that led to a half-hour pause in the middle of Act 1.) What should be a taut, intimate drama following two families is instead filled with too many unnecessary characters.
Unfortunate, as well, is the excessive amount of violence and brutality depicted on stage. It goes beyond illustrating Ralph and Mitsue’s circumstances, and begins to feel altogether gratuitous by the top of the second act. The result is that the story’s two central characters remain largely passive throughout, defined not so much by their actions, but rather by what happens to them.
Most concerning is how Kanagawa frames some of the Japanese soldiers’ violence toward the Canadian POWS. In one scene, he seems to justify the inhumanity of one Japanese interpreter, on account of how he was treated when he lived in Canada. “He hates us cuz of how he was treated back home,” remarks one of Ralph’s peers. There’s also a subtle implication that some of the Canadian soldiers killed had met their fates because of their racist tendencies, as if that were some form of divine retribution.
The play’s large cast delivers a mixed bag of performances. Lillico is far better as young Ralph than as the older version of his character: shoulders hunched, knees trembling, hands fidgeting at the side of his body — he depicts an awkward yet restless teenager itching to escape from home. As Mitsue, arms dutifully folded in front of her waist, Bancroft is a model of a steadfast, committed woman, even if she has a tendency to shout some of her lines. But it’s Kanagawa, Man and Oyama, each playing several characters, who provide some of the show’s strongest performances.
Still, that’s far from enough to redeem this play, haphazardly translated from the page to the stage. Can its faults be forgiven? I’m not so sure. Forgiveness, after all, can sometimes be one hell of a difficult thing.
