Hiro's Tiger Tales

War crimes play takes on new relevance at Factory Theatre

Vancouver playwright and actor Hiro Kanagawa is quickly being pegged as Someone To Watch this season. He's appeared in a long list of films, including Replicant, Josie and the Pussycats, Best in Show and Beautiful Joe. He has recurring parts on Smallville (school principal H. James Kwan) and Cold Squad (James Kai), and, like every other notable west coast actor, he's played a couple of roles on The X-Files (in the episodes called "Firewalker" and "Synchrony", for the fans out there.)
But the talented actor also writes. His first full-length play, Slants, was about an Asian university student who downplays a racist incident that has apparently been directed at her. Now his new script Tiger of Malaya has been chosen to open the Factory Theatre season.
"I think certainly that theatre is very much more fulfilling than the vast majority of TV work," comments Kanagawa, "especially because where I live in Vancouver the vast majority of TV is American. Having said that, working on independent Canadian projects is a joy," he adds.
Charismatic Toronto director Sarah Stanley came across Kanagawa's work while she was studying at the Vancouver Film School, and she directed him in the role of Robert (the bartender) in Brad Fraser's disturbing drama Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. Through Stanley, the show made its way into Factory's CrossCurrents festival, and from there to workshopping and a full production, That's how we Torontonians will get to see the work before it ever reaches Kanagawa's home town.
The title of the play refers to the nickname of the powerful Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, who was tried in the U.S. in late 1945 and early 1946 for a terrible massacre in Manila that took place just as the Second World War was ending. The play traces the events of the military tribunal up to the point of the general's death.
"From the beginning I never expected it to be a historical re-enactment or a courtroom drama," Kanagawa says. "What interested me was a clash of cultures. These American lawyers had to defend a Japanese general; the victims were Filipino. The translator is a second-generation Japanese American. These are characters who are very conflicted about their identity and loyalties."
As he was working on the script, current events made its content increasingly topical, Kanagawa says. "When I started writing, 9-11 hadn't happened yet. A lot of the themes in the play touch on justice in the context of war. Now with the U.S. threatening to use military tribunals to prosecute Al Qaeda, with the Milosevic trial, with the 'friendly fire' inquiry, these issues are much more urgent. When I started writing, I thought these issues would be more esoteric."
But Kanagawa didn't feel he had to alter his original script in order to accommodate its growing relevance to current affairs. "By that point the story was what it was," he says. "The story inherently resonates in our time."


Tiger of Malaya opens the Factory Theatre season from October 16 to November 9. For tickets and information, call 416.504.9971.

Publication Date: 2003-10-12
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3239