american, three, rather, but there are 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. 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 e

so how do you go about creating specific voices for a jewish russian character by way of yokohama, for an african american character, for all these different characters? i know you worked with specific actors. did they help at all? what was the process there? . >> absolutely. in terms of the african american characters, i wrote this piece initially for the act core company and i thought it would be a great challenge to actually write a play for the core company and the core company has two african american characters and i had tailored two of the characters for steven anthony jones and gregry wallace. it's interesting that gregory wallace, an african american man, was supposed to play mr. oge, an excentric neisei who likes literature. i thought it would be an interesting thing to do. but after a while we did a reading and we realized as good an actor as gregory is, it was pushing his limits for him to play a japanese american character in the late 40's. >> i imagine him as being much older. >> in the course of writing the play and using various actors, he became younger. this chinese a