The official blog of the Dramaturgy Department at Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE. For posts related to our current and upcoming shows, click the links to the right. Alternatively, you could begin at the beginning, and explore our posts in chronological order.
California Rep. Michael Honda finds that recent congressional hearings recall the atmosphere around the internment of his family and many others during WWII.
USS Shaw burns during the attack on Pearl Harbor, the incident that incited the roundup of Japanese and Japanese Americans in throughout the Pacific Northwest as commemorated in Snow Falling on Cedars.
Troops from the 442nd RCT slog through the Vosges Mountains during operations on the Western Front, during WW2. (Kabuo Miyamoto volunteers for this unit in Snow Falling on Cedars.)
Front line infantrymen of the “Lost Battalion,” 141st Infantry Regiment, relax around a camp fire after being rescued by Japanese American soldiers from the 442nd RCT in France. October 31, 1944.
from the European Center of Military History
“A young evacuee of Japanese ancestry waits with the family baggage before leaving by bus for an assembly center in the spring of 1942.” by Clem Albers, California, April 1942. (Photo No. 210-G-2A-6).
Ten-minute documentary about the nisei-composed 442nd Regiment and their rescue of the Lost Battalion during WW2.
Video tribute to the 21 Japanese American Medal of Honor recipients from the Second World War.
Short music video about the Japanese American internments during World War II. The backdrop to Snow Falling on Cedars—the theatrical adaptation, just as for the original novel and the film.
“A Nisei Story:” oral history narrative from a Nisei woman who, as a teenager at the outbreak of World War II, had to leave her father’s strawberry farm for an internment camp. Some of the background material we’re gathering for the cast of Snow Falling on Cedars, whose story of course mirror this woman’s experiences to some degree.
The Texas Historical Commission is hoping to get the Crystal City site on the National Register of Historic Places, a designation that could help ensure its preservation. Japanese, Germans and Italians, both foreign nationals and foreign-born American citizens were rousted from their homes and shipped to camps almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
via i.huffpost.com
Baltimore, MD
October 22, 2010
…I had stopped attending performances at Center Stage because of my hearing problems. But I was reassured that you do supply hearing aides for the performances [we do indeed], and I am most eager to see—and hear!—these performances—*especially* ReEntry. My husband was a physician with an evacuation hospital during WWII, and he has 5 stars for the 5 battles in which his unit was engaged, from the landing on the Normandy beach, until his being in charge of a released-prisoner-of-war camp in Germany at the end of the war. His later adjustment to civilian life afterward was not easy, especially his relationship with his little daughter, who was born five months after he had left home!
P.S. I’m sorry—I can’t use a computer. I’m 99 years old, & it’s too late to learn!
from a letter sent to the Box Office last week