- OTHER MEDIA
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- Political Puppets
Napkins, chopsticks, and teapots bring a Japanese internment camp to life
By Chloe Veltman
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- Lunatique Fantastique's Executive Order 9066 is an unusual kind of
concentration camp play. There are no verbatim testimonies from real-life
prisoners to give the work a veneer of journalistic vérité;
no graphic scenes of guard brutality to make viewers run out and buy every
anti-war bumper sticker they can lay their hands on; no orphans, no songs
about escaping into one's inner life, and no actors doing impersonations
of political figures. In fact, there are no actors, in the traditional
sense of the word, at all: The cast consists of a few napkins, a pair of
chopsticks, a small suitcase, a teapot, a pair of old boots, and a motley
assortment of other everyday objects.
- Originally conceived in 2003 and now in revival at the Marsh to commemorate
the 60th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, Executive
Order 9066 tiptoes softly behind other more ostentatious examples of the
genre recently seen on Bay Area stages. These include Victoria Brittain
and Gillian Slovo's heavy-handed documentary-style treatise on the plight
of detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Guantánamo:
Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (at Brava Theater Center in April) and Christine
Evans' Slow Falling Bird, an overwrought, magical realism-infused take
on daily life at Australia's Woomera Immigration Detention Center, which
recently received its world premiere in a production by Crowded Fire Theater
Company. That's not to say that these other shows aren't powerful exposés
of prison camp politics. It's just that what they convey through elaborate
staging, large casts of characters, and lengthy, polemical texts, Executive
Order 9066 manages to do with a handful of otherwise unremarkable inanimate
items dancing silently on the surface of a long rectangular table.
- Set in the early 1940s, the production tells the story of a Japanese
family (a mother and her two young sons) sent from their home in California
to Topaz War Relocation Center, a detention camp for Japanese prisoners
in Millard County, Utah, 140 miles south of Salt Lake City. Topaz was one
of 10 internment camps to which approximately 120,000 ethnic Japanese and
people of Japanese descent living mostly on the U.S. West Coast were sent
in the backlash following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942. This
action was taken under an edict of President Franklin D. Roosevelt known
as Executive Order 9066.
- Like all of Lunatique Fantastique's work, this wildly imaginative piece
of found-object puppet theater pares actions and emotions down to their
bare essentials. A battered suitcase takes on multiple roles in the piece,
serving at once as a repository for the evicted family's belongings, the
vehicle that transports them to Topaz, and, in broader terms, as a metaphor
for displacement. In the hands of the company's team of dexterous, black-hooded
object puppeteers, three napkins -- two topped with teacups and a third
with a bamboo-handled teapot -- are all it takes to bring the sons and
their kimono-wearing mother to life. Armed with a couple of chopsticks,
the high-spirited youngsters divide their time between playing baseball
and re-enacting fight scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style
films, their little napkin legs running in thin air like samurai of the
silver screen. Meanwhile, their mother catches up on the latest news and
gossip with a neighbor, a local "all-American" football mom conjured
into existence with the aid of another napkin (this time decorated with
blue and white checks like a gingham apron), a white teapot, and a pair
of wooden spoon arms.
- Found-object puppet theater is neither the most obvious nor the easiest
choice of medium through which to tell this difficult, poignant story.
At times, the action can be tricky to follow without prior background knowledge.
A scene in which we see one of the sons signing a document, for instance,
makes little sense unless you happen to know about the "loyalty questionnaire,"
a registration survey sent around the prison camps during the war demanding
that Japanese prisoners declare full allegiance to the U.S. -- including,
for males over the age of 17, recruitment to the U.S. Army. So while solving
the intricate visual puzzles presented to us in the play can be a very
satisfying experience, a failure to grasp key moments can interfere with
the audience's enjoyment of the show.
- One could also argue that while the bare-bones approach to storytelling
works beautifully for the company's more lighthearted, whimsical shows
like The Wrapping Paper Caper and Cirque du Celery, which place the power
of the imagination at a premium, the particular eccentricities of the medium
cannot help but oversimplify these key events in U.S. history by inadequately
tackling, for example, the thorny political motivations behind the government's
decision to build the camps. But to the extent that Executive Order 9066
isn't so much a political pamphlet in dramatic form as it is a spiraling
meditation on the pointless loss of innocent lives at a time of national
pressure, the production is deeply haunting. It is also, in places, very
funny. Just as the company's 2001 work, Snake in the Basement: The Prosecution
of Rev. Bill Pruitt, derived much of its bitter strength from the gap between
the playful "innocence" of the puppetry and the brutal story
about a child molester, so much of Executive Order 9066's polemical power
lies in the chasm between the dark subject and the playful energy of the
object-theater style -- a style which brings to mind the solemnity of a
Japanese tea ceremony and the delicate beauty and cheeky sense of humor
of the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki.
- In some ways, Lunatique Fantastique's method is perfectly suited to
the telling of this tale inasmuch as the traditional Japanese puppet theater
form, bunraku-style puppetry, shares several key stylistic elements with
Lunatique Fantastique. Although bunraku uses elaborate, lifelike marionettes
each about three or four feet high, the puppets, like the household object
creations in Lunatique's shows, are manipulated by several puppeteers.
And as in Executive Order 9066 and its predecessors, the handlers in bunraku
wear black gowns and hoods and do not speak. (The puppeteers in Lunatique
shows occasionally make sounds, but they don't usually use real words.)
- The morphing of objects in and out of recognizable forms, the meticulousness
of the choreography, the meaning imbued by even the subtlest gesture, and
the sense of fun, even in spite of the dark subject matter, all make for
mesmerizing viewing. Perhaps the Tony Award Committee should introduce
a new category for "Best Performance by an Inanimate Household Object"
in 2006. It would be a tight contest between the gingham napkin and the
suitcase, though.
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