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tv   [untitled]    April 7, 2012 12:00am-12:30am PDT

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could quit. there was somebody else that could take our job. we were fired more times than i can remember for asking for our wages to be raised, but i thought that was the way it was in america. i thought that if you complained, you would be breaking your oath that you made when you came to this country. we on this something was wrong, we just did not know what we could do about it. until one day i picked up a copy of the newspaper that translate to "ill bred," a not to child -- naughty child, someone who does not behave themselves. i read about how the farm workers association and its
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director, cesar chavez, had taken a labor contract before the labor commissioner. they had gotten him fined for not paying workers their wages. to me, this was unheard of, that mexican workers could stand up, fight, and win. not only did they beat the labor contractor, this contractor happened to be the largest labor contractor in the delano area. he also happened to be white. to me, it was like a light went off in my head. then we started hearing that there was going to be a great -- grape strike. i was 19 years old. i did not know what that was. but i could feel the electricity
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in the air. i could feel the sense that something big was going to happen, but i just did not know what. one day my mother and sister came running into the house and said, " we are on strike." they said they walked out. i had been at home because i had broken my leg. i was watching "i love lucy." [laughter] that took me away from watching it. i thought it was incredible. they said there is going to be a march. i went out and there were these workers, mexicans and filipinos, marching. there had never been a march in the city of delano. that night, there was going to be a strike meeting. i went. i could not stand the excitement
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of something big going on. i could taste it. i could feel it. i walked into the church of our lady of guadalupe in delano. it was packed. people were all around the walls and yelling. for somebody to have created this, cesar chavez must be like 10 feet tall. he must have a voice like james earl jones, the voice of god. this man stands up, very well- spoken. do you remember a movie star called david niven? very distinguished, well-spoken. i thought that must be cesar chavez.
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he was introducing siegler to of this -- he was introducing cesar chavez. then cesar chavez walks up. he is like 5'5"with a very soft voice. it did not make sense. the more he began to speak, the more i forgot his height, what he looked like, because i focused on his message. he talked about human dignity, the rights of workers, the fact that working people have to sell their labor, but it does not mean they have to sell their souls or dignity. the more he talked, the more i understood the power we had as individuals and collectively. the next morning, i cracked open
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my piggy bank. oci paid three months' worth of used to join the union. [applause] that was 47 years ago. cesar chavez was a life changer. he made you believe you were capable of doing much more than you believe you were capable of. he said that imagination in new and that belief in yourself. he fed that imagination and belief in yourself. i went to chicago. i just turned 21.
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he said we were going to start a boycott and they needed me to go to chicago. me. i had barely graduated from eighth grade. i had been a farm worker all of this time, an immigrant. he said, you have to go to chicago for about two weeks. [laughter] i said, where is chicago? not far. [laughter] ok. but you have to take an airplane. i had never been on an airplane in my life. we're going to give you a name. when you get there, looked him up and figure it out. he gave me a bag of buttons to sell to raise money, one name, and $20. he put me on an airplane. who in their right mind would go to a city they have never been,
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you have no idea where it is, how big it is, with one name. it was not that i was dumb and young, it was that i believed. i went to chicago. i was there for four years, not two weeks. but we did stop the sale. we did win the grape boycott. we did build the union. [applause] cesar was also a master strategist. he was a master at power jujitsu, using your opponent's strength against them. he was a firm believer in nonviolence. he also had a very strong moral
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core that grounded his work and police -- and belief in the righteousness of the cause, social justice, and the belief that there is nothing you cannot accomplish when you are united and working together. those lessons are just as relevant today. today, many of the things that cesar fought for are in danger. today, we are facing difficult situations as a society. today, in the richest and most powerful country in the world, we are seeing such income inequality that we have never seen before.
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today, we have more millionaires and more poor people than in the middle class at any time in our history before. the unions have always been the ticket to the middle class for working people. they are under attack like never before. look at wisconsin, ohio, indiana. look at the state of california where again the corporations are trying to take away the voice of working people. they are doing that because they believe if they are to control the wealth of the country and the ballot box that they must do away with independent political forces. the labor movement is the largest, best resource, independent political force in this country. they think they have to do away with that because it is what stands between them and complete
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control in this country. if you look around the country, you see all of these bills that have been introduced to limit and restrict the right to vote for people of color, for students, for other people. you see the destruction of community organizations, acorn, it tends to defund planned parenthood. there is a coordinated attack going on in this country by the powerful in our society. it is not just that i am paranoid. if you just look at what is going on in state after state, it makes you understand that if we do not join together, we are going to see the american dream that cesar fought for, the
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martin luther king fought for, the out of the reach of average people in this country. we have huge challenges in front of us. the best way to honor cesar chavez in june 19 together to make sure -- is uniting together to make sure his dream and vision for society come true. freedom is a hard-won thing. every generation has to win it again. the song was part of a movie made it was called "the inheritance." it is true. every generation has to win it again. i am glad that this event is bringing us together again. the war horses with the young,
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the next generation. together, we have to fight for this country, for this nation that lives on in our hearts and dreams, a nation where it is a land of liberty and justice for all. that is our task. let's do it in memory of cesar chavez, but more importantly, let's do it for our children and grandchildren. thank you very much. [applause]
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. >> good evening and welcome to the san francisco public library. i'm joan jasper and i'm with the department of exhibitions and public programs at the library and i want to welcome you it our program tonight, our incredible evening with playwright and author phillip
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congatongas. this program is in connection with an exhibit, two exhibits, that we have up on the 6th floor. the first one is called if they came for me today, the japanese american internment project, and also we have another exhibition called relocation and resiliency, the japanese american internment in california. and both of those are up on the 6th floor and this is the last week, so if you haven't a chance to see these exhibits yet, we really encourage you to go on up and see them because they will be closing on sunday. we really want to thank community works for bringing the exhibit if they came for me today to the san francisco public library. and here to tell you a little bit more about community works is ruth morgan, so help me welcome ruth morgan. thank you. . >> thank you. i do hope that if you haven't seen the exhibit, you will go
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up to the skylight gallery and see it. the project actually involved over 225 young people who studied the japanese internment through the personal stories of 15 people who were interned or impacted by the internment. and the exhibition highlights the individual stories of each of the japanese americans who came into the classroom, as well as the rich student responses to these stories. the project really gave the students space to make very meaningful connections between the historical event of the japanese internment and contemporary and historical instances of social injustice in america today. but we're here today to meet phillip and chloe, so i want to introduce you to them. phillip also was one of the gracious japanese americans who came into the classroom and told his story. phillip congatonda went to law
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school and graduated hastings law school but never actually practiced law. he became the first chronicler of the japanese american experience and is credited with broadening the japanese -- broadening the definition of theater by bringing jap needs american stories to stages all across the country. he has collaborated with the most diverse american theater venues, from large mainstream houses to the most experimental venues to african american ethnic cally specific theaters reaching extraordinarily diverse audiences. from here to japan, his acclaimed sisters, maximoto premiered in 2005. in the last couple years he worked with camposanto on a fist of roses on male violence
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and an orchestral composition. many of his plays are collected in month more cherry blossoms published by washington press. among his awards are the civil liberties public education fund and lila wallace reader's digest award. phillip is also a respected independent film maker whose film recently premiered at sundance, but we're here to talk about his upcoming production, after the war. a jazz-infused drama set in post-war san francisco japan town in 1948 which chronicles the return of japanese americans into the internment -- from the internment camp.
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sharing this evening is chloe veltman. chloe was born in london and received a master's degree with distinction in conjunction with harvard university and the moscow art theater school. she has worked as a staff reporter for the daily telegraph and is a freelance writer, her articles appearing on both sides of the atlantic. she is the chief theater critic for the san francisco weekly, theater commentator for klaw. chloe worked for several years in u.s. and uk theater companies and is the recipient of the allen wright award for arts journalism, the sundance institute arts fellowship and the nea fellowship of
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journalism. in 2006, she received a best columnist nomination at the annual san francisco media excellence awards and her first book on acting was published by farber and farber in the uk and farber, inc., in the united states. let's welcome phillip and chloe >> hi there, phillip. >> hi, chloe >> so, this play, it's been quite a journey. we're talking 3 1/2 years, maybe nearly 50 different drafts and 5 workshops? . >> five workshops, yes. >> so, looking back at the journey, how has it been for you and has it come out as you expected it would? . >> what's interesting is if you
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work on a play this long, normally there are times that it becomes redundant and you get a little bored with the piece. it's only natural. it's pushing 4 years now. this one was interesting in that it never got boring or ever felt redundant and each thing that we did over these almost 4 years, whether it was going off to sundance or to writer's retreat they have in sheritan, wyoming -- is that where you went? . >> that was in utah and la as well, down there at the institute. >> they have another writer's retreat in sheritan, wyoming, so i spent time out there and we workshoped this in san francisco, we have done readings at the asia society in new york. each time we did a workshop, each time we did a reading, it moved the piece forward. i think in large part it has to
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do with working with cary pearloff, the director, but she is also an excellent dramator. she worked closely with me in terms of the writing of the material so as we went along, we were able to shape the piece as well as figure out how to stage it. it's an interesting piece in that i wrote it with a number of small themes and the choice is you either present it like a doll house, or rear view window where you have kind of a cut out and you kind of jump from one room to another, or -- and this was my preference -- to develop some kind of cinematic approach to allow for there to be a fluidity in all these separate scenes. so cary and the scenic designic, donna eastman, as well as the lighting designer
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jim ingles developed this idea of a turn table which would turn and allow the audience to see primary locations but see beyond that through the set secondary and tertiary types of scenes as opposed to being very boxy. so in the writing of the piece, all of this is taken into consideration while it was being developed, how we were going to stage it. over that period of 3 1/2 to 4 years, the piece got tighter, stronger, we worked with a variety of actors that came and went which in this particular case was very important because the material deals with people from a lot of different backgrounds and my own background is japanese american, there are two cake ters who are japanese american, three, rather, but there are
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african american characters, there's a russian jew by way of yokohama and i don't necessarily have those backgrounds. so in the workshop process, what it allows me to do to work with actors, particularly some of the african american characters, i can work with them to make sure the characters i am developing have a authentic, you know, authenticity to them and that they are from the inside out as opposed to sort of working from the outside in. so, for me, those kinds of things are critical so i spent a great deal of time making sure that the characters that were wrought that you will ultimately see on stage are truthful, are grounded in real life. so over this period of 3 1/2 to 4 years it was time well spent and it continues to be developed even as we speak. i'm going to go home and do some more rewriting after this.
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so it's still being worked on. >> so let's talk a little bit about the inspiration for the play. i mean, i've seen from reading different things about you that your productions or your plays have been inspired by very diverse things. for example, there's a play you are developing right now for the asian american company which is based on the asian children's book the five chinese brothers, a play called four chinks and a dike. there's also the dream of kitsumura which was inspired by a dream you had about your father. this play, way back, before it became this play was an adaptation of the 1954 play rashamon.
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how did you get from rashamon to this. >> the original idea was that i was going to do an adapt daition of rashamon. cary pearloff said you want to do a play for us, how about adapting rashamon. i said, sure. as is the case when i do this, sometimes i go in a straight line and sometimes i end up somewhere totally different. i've grown to accept it, that i'm going to follow the horse wherever it goes and hope that the theater is comfortable with it. so it started off as rashamon and i couldn't find an entree into it. for me, when i do an adaptation, i try to frame it
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in present day life context or contextualize it in another moment and bring that skeletal story line structure into it. and i couldn't make any headway. then a story that had been kind of floating around in my head kind of came to the fore, and is as the case when i write, there will be story lines floating around in my head for years, years and years are floating around in my head waiting for a moment to find its moment. and this story that i had been working on off and on about this boarding house in san francisco post internment camps. as i worked on this rashamon story, this other one came alive and they began to meld and they wrote themselves and became after the war. so when you see the play, you will see elements of rashamon in the play, but you will have
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to look very closely. and to cary pearloffs and scp's credit, they were very cool about it, which is the neat thing about working in theater as opposed to film. they said fine, let's go with this, let's run with it. once they were comfortable with it we continued to work on it for 3 1/2, 4 years now. >> so the play takes -- this play that you have now written, that has developed from that seed idea, takes its theme japanese internment camps and what happened to someone who had been in internment camps. >> uh-huh. >> this character had not only been sent there, the central character in the play, but also he had said he wasn't going to fight in the war. perhaps you'd like to talk a little bit about the theme of the play, but also the theme of the internment camp is something you visited quite a bit in your writing, phillip.
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in matsumoto and also in the collaboration with ken suganoff but i know this is a theme you come back to time and time again. >> if you are japanese american, it's one of those things that is just a part of your body. that's there no matter where you look or how fast you run or if you embrace it, it's simply there. i was born post-war, post internment camps in the 50's. and though it wasn't something that was talked about a lot at the time i was growing up, it certainly was always there and as i grew older and i began to write and i began to write about stories of my family, i began to realize that that particular historical moment, because it affected en as