I was asked to be a judge in a Japanese-American play competition, the Ruby Schaar Award, and accepted. There were only four entries I had to read. Two of the four got produced in NY, a Philip Kan Gotanda play, “Yankee Dog You Die,” about Japanese-American actors in Hollywood who played brutal Japanese captors in WW ll movies, and this play, ” Lucky Come Hawaii,” about an Okinawan immigrant pig farmer in Maui and his family and community, and their response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Not surprisingly “Yankee Dog ” won, but I voted for “Lucky.” It was a complex play about that period in Hawaii, revolving around the naturally divided loyalties of the Japanese immigrants themselves, and the loyalty of their American-born children. Oh, yeah, it’s a comedy.
After the competition, I was free to contact Jon Shirota, the playwright of “Lucky,” who had adapted the play from his novel of the same name, so I did and got permission to do a reading at Pan Asian Rep. I thought the play was very funny, in different comedic ways. Situation comedy, funny characters, slyly humorous writing, a kind of a comic chorus consisting of two local layabouts, and a bit of farce as well, helped make the reading a success, and Pan Asian decided to produce it. Luckily, the play received a prestigious Kennedy Center production grant that helped enormously with the production itself, but also with the marketing, which featured the receiving of the grant.
At the opening I was talking with David Hawkanson, then Managing Director of Hartford Stage Company, whom I had met when I had worked with Mark Lamos a few years earlier when I was at Hartford Stage on my NEA/TCG Directing Fellowship, and he told me that he had championed “Lucky Come Hawaii” and Pan Asian Rep, as a member of the grant selection committee. I was surprised, thinking, how lucky, then thinking how did that happen, then thanked him profusely. It was a big deal for Jon Shirota and his play, and for Pan Asian Rep as well.
The connectivity of it all in the process of getting that grant, David and myself, Hartford Stage and Pan Asian, Tisa Chang, NEA/TCG and the Kennedy Center, and Jon’s play, was the surprising and lasting thing that I took away from “Lucky Come Hawaii.” Not lucky, but hard work by a lot of people to make all those connections.
