Tachinoki (play)

Play by acclaimed playwright Robert Schenkkan based on the life of Sumi Seo, a Nisei who was sixteen when she and her family were forcibly removed from their farm in San Pedro, California, during with World War II and incarcerated at the Santa Anita Assembly Center and the Jerome , Arkansas concentration camp. The play opened in the 1987–88 season of the Ensemble Studio Theater in Hollywood, California and premiered on November 12, 1987. Seo worked closely with Schenkkan and director Heidi Helen Davis in the writing and production of the play. The cast included Diana Tanaka as Seo, Amy Hill and Jim Ishida as her parents, and Darrell Kunitomi as her brother Masa. Director Davis, whose Nisei mother had been incarcerated at Minidoka , described the play as "a combination of Brecht, living newspaper, agitprop, and some dramatic scenes." [1] Playwright Schenkkan later won a Pulitzer Prize for The Kentucky Cycle (1992) and Tony Award for All the Way (2014).

Authored by Brian Niiya , Densho

This page is complete and will be published to the production Encyclopedia.

For More Information

Drake, Sylvie. " Stage Review: Internment Saga Opts for Gentle Irony ." Los Angeles Times , Nov. 17, 1987.

"Former Internee Is Subject of Play." Pacific Citizen , Nov. 13, 1987, 10.

Robert Schenkkan website biography: http://www.robertschenkkan.com/biography/expanded-biography .

Footnotes

  1. Janice Arkatov, "Kitchen Collective Offers a Poetic View of Vietnam, Los Angeles Times , Nov. 8, 1987, accessed on Dec. 18, 2014 at http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-08/entertainment/ca-21809_1_vietnam-war .

Last updated Sept. 26, 2016, 5:15 p.m..