Forgiveness never lets up in its explorations of grief, grace and the chasm of hurt in between.David Hou/Stratford Festival
Title: Forgiveness
Written by: Hiro Kanagawa, adapted from Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents
Performed by: Sean Arbuckle, Yoshie Bancroft, Jacklyn Francis, June Fukumara, Steven Hao, Manami Hara, Hiro Kanagawa, Jeff Lillico, Allison Lynch, Michael Man, Douglas Oyama
Directed by: Stafford Arima
Company: Stratford Festival
Venue: Tom Patterson Theatre
City: Stratford, Ont.
Year: Until Sept. 27
Critic’s Pick
In the United States and beyond, the detention and forced removal of immigrants and their children is nothing new. While the Trump administration has ramped up the U.S. government’s deportation efforts in recent months with shocking levels of cruelty, societies large and small have long sought to excise the unknown – to compartmentalize civilization into its separate languages, colours and customs.
Japanese-Canadians know this particular flavour of fear-mongering well. In the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, approximately 22,000 Japanese residents were removed from British Columbia – some shipped to Japan, some sent to domestic work camps and farms. None were ever charged with disloyalty.
In Forgiveness, previously produced in Western Canada and sensitively adapted for the stage by Hiro Kanagawa from Mark Sakamoto’s memoir of the same title, a community of Japanese-Canadians must come to terms with a home country that will no longer tolerate their existence.
Some leave for Japan, even those born in Canada with no ties to an island some 7,000 kilometres away; some elect to pick sugar beets for pennies per acre, their shoulders slick with sweat beneath the vast Alberta sky. “Work is freedom,” the displaced Canadians murmur to themselves as they toil, the vegetables piling up in wicker baskets beside them.
Meanwhile, as war efforts persist in Japan and across Europe, Canadian troops face horrors of their own, from collective punishments to debilitating illnesses. When soldiers die, their ghosts linger in the smoke. While the bombing of Hiroshima all but ends the Second World War, it eradicates an entire generation of civilians and sets off a chain of torment for which there can be no tactical resolution. The Canadian soldiers return home, forever haunted by their time as prisoners in the Pacific.
Michael Man as Hideo and Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue contribute to another must-see at this year’s Stratford festival.David Hou/Stratford Festival
It’s a massive, staunchly Canadian story that ripples and aches across generations, à la Fall on Your Knees or Mary’s Wedding. As such, the show never lets up in its explorations of grief, grace and the chasm of hurt in between. These are excruciatingly dark chapters of Canadian history, but they’re brought to life with a surprising amount of levity in Arima’s sprawling, sparse production. (Kudos, as well, to the production team, which elegantly handled a 30-minute pause in the first act on opening night after a medical emergency in the audience.)
A few scenes in Kanagawa’s script choke on the violence of the war, barbed with ethnic slurs and broken limbs, but more are genuinely funny. When Mitsue (the astounding Yoshie Bancroft) comes of age in the early 1940s, she’s flummoxed by the speed with which the local boys pummel her with marriage proposals — and they’re all played for easy, nostalgic laughs by Steven Hao, in varying degrees of fake moustaches, wigs and hats.
Mitsue’s earlier childhood, too, rings true with ease, especially during her walks home from school with bestie Miyoko (June Fukumura). When the war becomes impossible to ignore, those memories bring fleeting comfort to Mitsue’s corner of the sugar beet farm in Alberta. Someday, she hopes, she’ll feel that love in all its simplicity once more — with her husband Hideo (a superb Michael Man) by her side.
Mitsue and her husband survive; so does white Canadian soldier Ralph MacLean (Jeff Lillico, magnificent), who returns home, marries and baby-booms. The disparate families raise kids of their own through the 1960s, and before long, their children are teenagers, ready to take on the world in all its grooviness.
It can be easy to accept other cultures in the abstract – to say one thing out loud but stew privately in deeply-felt prejudice. In that vein, Forgiveness culminates in a dinner party that sees two unlikely characters shake hands; share space; break bread. Forgive.
There are no weak links in the production, painted in tender strokes by Arima and his design team. Lorenzo Savoini’s set and costumes ably suggest a slurry of interconnected eras, complemented by Cindy Mochizuki’s animations, which capture a fuzzy, childlike snapshot of lives long gone. Allison Lynch’s musical compositions, too, add a filmic quality to this enormous story – it’s wonderful to see Lynch and Arima work together on a Stratford stage. (The two often collaborate at Theatre Calgary, where Arima serves as artistic director.)
The play provides a poignant reminder of what has been lost and a warning of what’s to come for society’s most vulnerable communities.David Hou/Stratford Festival
Forgiveness is a difficult, harrowing piece of theatre that manages to be both deeply specific yet broadly relatable at the same time. Several of the production team have familial ties to the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s, and those personal connections to the material sing through the work. Any of these characters could be your grandparent, neighbour or friend — they’re thoughtfully written and brilliantly performed.
Indeed, Forgiveness is another must-see at this year’s festival, a reminder of what’s been lost and a warning of what’s to come for society’s most vulnerable communities if modern-day rulers aren’t kept in check. Detention centres for non-violent immigrants and botched deportations aren’t a mere blip in human history – they’re an inevitable byproduct of fascism and fear. Against all odds, Forgiveness advocates for – well, it’s in the title – and missing this production in the current political climate would be a fatal mistake.
