| 'Hold These Truths': The inspiring story of an American's 50-year fight for equal rights | |
| Last Edit: WaymanWong 11:44 am EDT 07/11/18 | |
| Posted by: WaymanWong 11:32 am EDT 07/11/18 | |
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| I heartily recommend Jeanne Sakata's sensational ''Hold These Truths," which kicks off tonight (July 11) and plays through Aug. 5 at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, Calif. Joel de la Fuente, currently playing Inspector Kido on Amazon's ''The Man in the High Castle,'' gives a Drama Desk-nominated, one-man tour de force as civil-rights champion Gordon Hirabayashi (and 36 other characters). During World War II, he was a University of Washington student who openly defied the U.S. government's decision to relocate and intern Japanese-Americans, calling it discriminatory. The U.S. District Court of Seattle convicted him of defying the exclusion act, and he would appeal his case all the way to the Supreme Court … and lose in 1943. He would be imprisoned and go on to become a professor, fighting for equal justice under the law for all Americans. In 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, and in 2012, President Obama awarded Hirabayashi posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The word ''hero'' gets thrown around a lot in an era of DC and Marvel action movies, but Hirabayashi was a real one. And de la Fuente makes you feel his trials and tribulations and triumph every step of the way. It's so important to remember Hirabayashi's story, which is still timely. Especially at a time when the U.S. government is trying to justify its unjustifiable treatment of immigrants at the border by wrongly citing the internment of Japanese-Americans. In 1942, the Supreme Court ruled against Japanese-Americans, saying race was not a factor; it was a military necessity. It would take decades before historian Peter Irons stumbled across evidence that government officials had withheld several documents from the Supreme Court stating that the Japanese-Americans posed no threat to the U.S. As a result, the convictions of Minoru Yasui, Fred Koramatsu and Hirabayashi were overturned in the 1980s, and Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, apologizing for the internment. Here's a video clip of de la Fuente discussing his challenges of acting solo in ''Hold These Truths'' … |
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| Link | Backstage Pass with Lia Chang: Interview with Joel de la Fuente, star of 'Hold These Truths' |
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