Review: Hold These Truths

Review: Hold These Truths  | Platte Valley Theatre Arts | Brighton, CO | Curtain Up! | Gina Robertson

Gordon Hirabayashi (Rob Payo), a sixty-five-year-old retired professor of sociology, is a storyteller. Handsome and tidy in his bowtie, loafers, and pocket handkerchief, he is here to tell a story about his Japanese American heritage, a part of himself that America once treated as a crime.

Hold These Truths is a one-person performance on stage at the Armory in Brighton, produced by Platte Valley Theatre Arts. Hirabayashi’s tale, written by Jeanne Sakata, recounts his youth in Washington state, where he attended college when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. At the time, Americans of his heritage were considered suspect and too dangerous to be allowed to just exist freely in society.

While sitting in the library one evening studying with friends, 8 pm drew near, and Hirabayashi recognized the absurdity of making a mad dash across campus in the rain to return to his dorm for curfew when his friends, some of them foreigners, were free to study in the library for as long as they liked. He stayed in defiance of curfew, and later, when it was his turn to report for encampment, he refused to go. As a result, he was charged, tried, convicted, and served 90 days.

Though his conviction was reversed decades later, it was first upheld in a shocking ruling by the Supreme Court. Hirabayashi and his family were subject to many injustices and humiliations. He was one of three Japanese Americans who challenged the constitutionality of forced removal in the 1940s.

Payo is jovial, professorial, and appropriately incensed by the subject matter. He delivers the monologues aptly, but the dialogue is at times a bit confusing, especially when he appears to be re-enacting a conversation he had with someone else.

Director Kelly Van Oosbree has collaborated with lighting and sound designers Emily Maddox and Erin Kubat to create a compelling atmosphere in which Payo delivers Hirabayashi’s story, enhanced with sound effects and projected photographs of Japanese faces experiencing the disturbing events depicted on stage.

We are asked to contemplate what truths we hold as a society. How strongly do we really honor them, and what would we be willing to endure to defend those ideals as actual truth personally?

Hold These Truths will inspire you to learn more about the shocking actions our government was once willing to take to enforce its society’s racism and white fragility. It’s crucial for us to remember these truths and draw strength from them, because such lessons are never permanently learned, and truths must be revisited.

Hold These Truths plays through February 7 at the Armory in Brighton, CO.

For information and tickets: https://www.plattevalleytheatrearts.org/hold-these-truths