When Allegiance went into preview performances last month, it was still being tweaked says
book writer Lorenzo Thione.
LORENZO THIONE: It's like archeology, a story is down there it lies down there and you just
have to dig it up.
JAY KUO: But what I have learned in sort of unearthing the story is that a lot has gone
unspoken in 70 years.
That's composer Jay Kuo.
JAY KUO: The Japanese American culture would sooner bury the indignity and the shame than
speak about it.
That was the way that things were for decades.
It wasn't until generations had passed that people began asking more questions and these
stories started to come out...
Stories like those of George Takei who was 5 when he was taken to a Japanese American
internment camp.
GEORGE TAKEI: My most vivid memory I think is that day when the soldiers came marching
up, two soldiers came marching up our driveway they had bayoneted rifles and I remember the
glinting of those bayonets.
Stomped up our front porch and banged on the front door and ordered our family out.
JAY KUO: We never thought in a million years that we would write a music set during the
Japanese American internment but just hearing George tell that story you know when you're
hearing a great story, you also realize this is a story, that for some reason has never
been told on the big Broadway stage before.
As a composer, Kuo writes in the language of music and always saw the story as a musical.
JAY KUO: What music does is liberate the spoken word into the emotional and the emotions that
are buried underneath that haven't been spoken in so long are so intense that the music allows
them to come out so lately I've been saying how could the story not be told through music.
For Takei it was important to tell this story about when the nation faltered.
GEORGE TAKEI: I think we learn more from those chapters than we do from the glorious chapters
that we have plenty of.
And the internment story is still little known and even less understood.
MARC ACITO: I knew about as much about the Japanese American internment as pretty much
any American, which is very little.
Marc Acito helped write the book for the play.
Actress Lea Solanga says schools do little to inform students about the Japanese American
internment.
LEA SALONGA: I remember a lot of kids that were saying we only got one paragraph of this
entire abominable experience to this entire community of people, how do you encapsulate
4-5 years of what is incarceration in an internment camp, how do you encapsulate that in a paragraph
in a textbook.
You can't.
Even Kuo, who was a civil rights attorney and worked on cases involving the internment,
felt he could learn more.
JAY KUO: What I hadn't experienced on a personal level were a lot of the personal stories and
so I found myself drawn in by diaries and poetry and art made by the internees incredible
things that need to be given voice.
Something Takei felt was long overdue.
But the tone of the play may surprise you with its humor and hope.
GEORGE TAKEI: Yes it was torturous and harrowing at times but people still fell in love, they
got married, had children, so there was joy.
You can't survive something like that with all grim suffering.
LEA SALONGA: Because the reality is there were moments of lightness and life, just happening
within the confines of barbed wire fences.
A lot of the internees were farmers they were actually able to tame the ground and grow
vegetables.
MARC ACITO: It was a doom and gloom situation in which they managed to bloom where they
were planted and that's enormously inspiring.
The internment was more than just a violation of civil rights.
It raised a divisive series of questions within the Japanese American community about where
one's allegiance lies.
JAY KUO: Does your allegiance for example lie with the country that did this to you,
do you still pledge allegiance to the US even if your due process and equal rights have
been violated.
For Takei's father the answer was a resounding yes.
GEORGE TAKEI: My father used to say both the strength and the weakness of our democracy
is in the fact that it is a people's democracy.
It can be as great as people can be but also as fallible as people are.
Family members are also imperfect and the family at the center of the play are torn
apart by more questions of allegiance.
JAY KUO: Do you keep allegiance to a family when your family is fractured?
Do you resist the government do you stand up even if it puts your family at risk.
LORENZO THIONE: For lack of a better term we always called this like the call your dad
story because it's about that feeling of regret that can come when relationships get damaged
and what can one do to really fix those and move forward.
JAY KUO: This was an event that fractured the Japanese American community 70 years ago.
And it's still fractured to day and so we're still engaging with the community on that
today and that means to me that these wounds are not completely healed and all of the things
that we are talking about are still relevant.
Allegiance is groundbreaking not only for its subject but also for providing Asian American
actors an opportunity to break out of stereotypes and play multi-dimensional roles.
LEA SALONGA: Everybody who is of Asian descent doing the show, it isn't lost on any one of
us how big of an opportunity and how wonderful of a chance this is to tell a story like this
one.