Review: ‘Hold These Truths’, a great feat of storytelling, an acting triumph

American history now records the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens, as a tragic injustice – the product of wartime hysteria and anti-Japanese racism.

The most famous challenge to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, authorizing the “exclusion” of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, was Fred Korematsu’s case. The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the government’s favor is a staple of constitutional law classes.

Jeanne Sakata’s immensely moving one-man play, Hold These Truths, is about another, earlier legal challenge. Gordon Hirabayashi, an American-born Quaker and University of Washington student, wanted simply to complete his studies in peace. But as the rest of his family complied with federal directives, Hirabayashi found himself saying no – to a curfew, the exclusion order, and, later, a loyalty oath.

Sakata’s play, which premiered in 2007 under the title Dawn’s Light, is no mere polemic. The People’s Light production, directed by Desdemona Chiang, is a great feat of storytelling, an acting triumph for Steven Eng (who plays 38 characters, including Hirabayashi, with precision and empathy), and 90 minutes of beautifully realized theater.

People’s Light was in rehearsals for the show, based partly on Sakata’s interviews with Hirabayashi (who died in 2012, at 93), when the pandemic halted live theater in March 2020. People’s Light pivoted to a streaming version. For this long-delayed live production, the theater has reassembled the original, all-Asian American creative team.

Set designer Se Hyun Oh has chosen a minimalist approach, enhanced by Dawn Chiang’s elegant lighting and Hidenori Nakajo’s evocative soundscape. Eng dramatizes Hirabayashi’s story on an almost bare stage, periodically retrieving props and costumes from a long, bench-like structure that functions as a theatrical trunk.

The play opens with reflections by the older Hirabayashi, a retired sociology professor, on both the optimistic Quaker philosophy and the assertion, from the Declaration of Independence, that supplies Sakata’s current title: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The most celebrated such truth, of course, is that “all men are created equal.”

In a note in the People’s Light program, Sakata wrongly attributes that phrase to the U.S. Constitution. And it is the Constitution to which Eng’s Hirabayashi repeatedly alludes, certain at first that the Bill of Rights’ guarantees will protect him as an American citizen – and then stricken when they do not.

Despite the poignancy of its subject, Hold These Truths also is infused with humor. Hirabayashi, desperate to serve his prison stint outside, ends up hitch-hiking to a broilingly hot work camp in Arizona. When a marshal can’t initially find his name on a list, he sends Hirabayashi out to an air-conditioned movie theater to pass the time – and counsels him to have fun.

There’s both darkness and light in this American story. Though Hirabayashi, like Korematsu, lost his Supreme Court case, both men received legal vindication some four decades later. Even so, the anti-Asian violence triggered by the pandemic gives this historical tale more currency than we might wish.

Hold These Truths

Presented by People’s Light on the Steinbright Stage, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, through May 1. Masks, plus either vaccination proof or recent negative COVID-19 test, required; limited-capacity performances available. Tickets: $25-$45. Information: 610-644-3500 or peopleslight.org.