F6 SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2019 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
BOOK REVIEW
He’s traveled the U.S., speaking
and holding writing workshops in
prisons, jails and juvenile lockups.
Now, more than quarter-cen-
tury after the publication of “Al-
ways Running,” Rodriguez has
helped adapt his seminal work into
a play, which will premiere Sat-
urday at the Casa 0101 Theater in
Boyle Heights.
In an interview, the 65-year-old
former L.A. poet laureate talked
about the continuing relevance of
his memoir and the challenge of
turning his story into live drama.
There was an earlier Cornerstone
Theater adaptation of “Always
Running” in the early 2000s,
aimed at high school students.
What led you to do a new adapt-
ation and bring it to the stage?
“Always Running” is probably
the most important book I’ve ever
written. I can’t say it’s my favorite
book, because I have so many. But
people read it in schools. They
read it in prisons. Librarians tell
me it’s one of the most checked-
out books and one of the most
stolen. [He laughs.] There’s a lot of
interest in that book, so I thought,
well, there’s got to be another way
to present at least part of the
message.
I was not involved in the first
production. I had no creative say
in anything, including the writing.
That said, it was not bad. It was
different in that the Cornerstone
Theater production was a one-
man show, with Jonathan Del Arco
as the actor.
Unlike the previous adaptation,
this version focuses upon the
relationship between you and
“Chente,” the pseudonym for the
mentor who helped you to turn
your life around.
A lot of the scenes come from
the book directly, but I can’t put
the whole book on stage. I wanted
to focus on the mentor’s dilemma
and the patience and persistence
required. He was a youth counsel-
or working with a very hardcore,
defiant, drug-addicted, homicidal,
suicidal kid, somebody that most
people wouldn’t want anything to
do with. But yet he decided, I’m
going to do what I can — not so
much to save that kid, but to give
him the tools, knowledge and
awareness he needs to save him-
self. And one of the things I wanted
to present was the process of
owning one’s life, especially after
someone has turned it over to
gangs and drugs, and to his own
rage. And the frustration of the
mentor who’s trying to help a kid
like that, because it’s usually two
steps forward, one step back.
In the end, I decided to go his
way. It finally made sense to me,
that the world he showed me was
bigger than the world I had de-
cided to die and kill for.Your book is filled with vivid
scenes, with lots of sensory
description and poetic use of
language. How much of a
challenge has it been to translate
that into a live performance? Was
it difficult to keep the story true
to life?
In the book, I did tell the reader
ahead of time I’m changing names
and circumstances to protect
people, but I’m not making any-
thing up. Now on the stage, we’regoing to take a little more license
to make it work. I want everyone to
know that, because they may
think, this isn’t exactly the way it
was in the book. And I’ve got some
homies who‘ll show up and say,
this is not exactly how it hap-
pened. The story has become
more important, but you’ve still
got to be careful — it can’t be so far
removed from the reality. You still
want to keep that trust.
Working with Casa 0101 has
been amazing. They know what
they’re doing, but they’re also
willing to look at what I want to
bring to it, the authenticity. And
Hector Rodriguez, who co-ad-
apted the play and is directing it,
has been a great guy to work with.
But I’m careful not to overstep my
bounds too. A director has to have
his own interpretation. I’m the
expert coach for the play, but I’m
not running things.It must have been an odd
experience to see an actor
portraying the youthful version
of you and the people you knew.
Did you help him to prepare for
the role?
It took a while, but I think we
have a really strong cast. I’m
amazed at the people we got. They
don’t look like the real people
they’re portraying, but they’re
trying to carry the story. RufinoRomero, the actor who plays me,
is not the skinny, big-chin guy I
used to be, but he’s carrying the
story so well, so that people can
suspend disbelief. At rehearsals,
he’s asked me so many great ques-
tions. He’s trying to understand
my motivations. He’s read the
book I don’t know how many
times. But he also knows he’s got
bring his own interpretation.How do you explain why “Always
Running” still has the ability to
move readers — and now, theater
audiences — after all these
years?
Gangs have changed a lot since
the ’80s and ’90s, which was the
most violent period. But it’s still
out there. To me, what still reso-
nates is how do we help kids, not
just criminalize them or demean
them. How do we provide them
with the mentoring, the teaching,
the truths, the resources they
need so they can pull themselves
up. And I think that’s where we’re
at now and I’d like to continue
with that message, that we need to
do more. There’s obviously per-
sonal responsibility, but there’s
also a social responsibility that
has to align with that.What can you tell us about your
next book, “From Our Land to
Our Land,” which will bereleased next year?
It’s a book of essays exploring
not just what’s happening in the
country but who we are as Mexi-
cans and Central Americans, and
our roots. I have an essay about
L.A. — the other L.A., the one that
people don’t see in movies and TV.
And there’s an essay about what
it’s like to be a migrant, especially
from an indigenous native group.
My roots in Mexico go back 10,000
years, to my mother’s tribe. And
yet we’re treated as strangers,
foreigners and aliens in our own
land. I really hope it’s a book that
will, at least, open up the whole
dialogue, in a healthier, more
artistic and poetic way.Kiger has written for GQ, Sierra
magazine, Fast Company and
History.com. He’s also co-written
two nonfiction books, “Poplorica”
and “Oops.”‘Running’ to a new horizon
[Rodriguez, from F1]
“ALWAYS RUNNING”is co-produced for the stage by its author, who is portrayed at Casa 0101 by Rufino Romero, third from left.Anaith IndjeianLUIS J. RODRIGUEZguides
his memoir to its next stage.Arlene MejoradoActor George Takei has told the
story of his childhood incarcera-
tion in an autobiography, a TED
talk and a Broadway musical. With
his new graphic memoir, “They
Called Us Enemy,” he hopes to
reach a generation that may know
little of how 120,000 Japanese
Americans were rounded up dur-
ing World War II and imprisoned
for years in internment camps.
Takei, a cultural icon forever as-
sociated with his role as Mr. Sulu
on the original “Star Trek” TV se-
ries, said he “grew up on comic
books” and remembers the enor-
mous impression they had on him.
“Perhaps by going the graphic
memoir route, the comic strip
route, we can reach the young peo-
ple at a point in life when they are
sucking in information,” says
Takei, who joins the Los Angeles
Times Book Club on Sept. 10.
“They Called Us Enemy” vividly
details the twists and turns of the
family’s nearly four years behind
barbed wire. The bestselling book
also has plenty to offer adult read-
ers who may have only a vague
understanding of the nightmarish
odyssey endured by ethnic Japa-
nese residents of California and
other West Coast states.
Takei’s journey began in 1942,
shortly after his fifth birthday,
when bayonet-toting soldiers
banged on the door of his family’s
Boyle Heights home and swiftly
took him away, along with his par-
ents, his two younger siblings and
the few belongings they could
carry.
They spent their first few
months of captivity in the hastily
cleared horse stalls of the Santa
Anita Race Track, still redolent
with the smell of manure.
After a few months at Santa
Anita, the family was sent by train
to the Rohwer relocation camp in
rural Arkansas. Takei remembers
Arkansas as a “fantastical, mag-
ical” new landscape where trees
grew out of swamps and he saw his
first snowfall. But the illustrated
book exposes the humiliation and
financial hardship suffered by his
parents as they struggled to adjust
to their new lives and survive intact
as a family.
“There are two parallel stories,”
Takei says. “I wanted to capture
the reality of this strange new
world that I was transported to,
but at the same time how my par-
ents felt and the anguish that they
were going through.”
In 1944, the family was moved to
the high-security Tule Lake Segre-
gation Center in remote Northern
California after Takei’s parents
were declared so-called disloyals
for refusing to answer two notori-
ous questions in the affirmative.
Almost 75 years later, Takei is
still angry about it. “Think of that:
the arrogance of demanding loy-
alty when they have, first of all,
impoverished you, and then im-
prisoned you, and now, becauseit fits their need and convenience.”
Takei expresses disbelief at how
government bureaucrats mangled
the questionnaire that landed him
and his family in a prison camp sur-
rounded by three rings of barbed-
wire fencing and patrolled by
tanks.
He specifically cites Question
28, which was worded in an am-
biguous way that forced Japanese
Americans to either admit they
had been loyal to the emperor of
Japan or be labeled as “disloyals.”
“It was an outrageous and igno-
rant question,” Takei says. “They
obviously didn’t know the English
language.”
Takei is an optimist who sees
progress since those wartime years
when there was little resistance to
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
order to lock away thousands of
Japanese American citizens and
legal residents.
It was a punishment that did
not apply to residents of Hawaii,
where they were critical to the
economy. Nor did it apply to citi-
zens of German or Italian origin,
“because they looked like the restof America,” Takei says.
But while he is heartened by
progress toward racial equality,
Takei is outraged by the current
treatment of asylum seekers at the
southern border and particularly
by the separation of families and
children. “It’s a new low,” he says,
noting that during his years of
incarceration, “we were always
intact as a family.”
“Now, their children are torn
away from them as examples, so
that other desperate people won’t
follow in their footsteps,” he says.
“This is beyond wartime hysteria.
This is intentional evil.”
Such views will not be surpris-
ing to Takei’s millions of fans on so-
cial media, where he expresses his
opinions daily and sometimes
hourly. At 82, he is a savvy mogul of
digital media, with 2.9 million Twit-
ter followers, 10 million Facebook
followers and his Oh Myyy network
of digital properties, which offers a
mix of news, politics and videos.
Takei marvels at how smart-
phones have put instant communi-
cation at our fingertips, far sur-
passing the future imagined by“Star Trek” creator Gene Rodden-
berry half a century ago. “Then, we
had this amazing device that we
wore on our hip, and whenever you
needed to talk to someone we
would just rip if off, flip it open and
start talking. That very fact was
the amazing thing that astounded
people. And now we think of all the
things we do with that device. We
don’t even flip it open anymore.”
This summer, Takei has been
busy promoting not only the book
but also his new TV series, “The
Terror: Infamy” on AMC, for which
producers built a scaled-down rep-
lica of the Manzanar internment
camp in Central California. Takei
plays an elder in the Japanese
American fishing village at Termi-
nal Island, which was wiped away
by the internment order after the
attack on Pearl Harbor.
Takei has been crisscrossing
the country between the homes he
shares with his husband, Brad, in
Hancock Park and New York City
and is making plans to travel to
England for a lecture at Cambridge
University.
It’s all part of his mission, he
says, to boldly create a world that
will be “a much more enlightened
one than the one we are now toler-
ating,” and will adhere to “the fun-
damental, noble ideas of our demo-
cratic system.”By Martin Wolk
TAKEIlost his home at 5.From George Takei
“THEY CALLED US ENEMY”is George Takei’s memoir.Harmony BeckerL.A. Times
Book Club:
George Takei
What: Takei discusses
“They Called Us Enemy.”
When:7:30 p.m. Sept. 10
Where: The Montalbán Theater,
1615 Vine St., Los Angeles.
Ticket info:
latimes.com/bookclubTakei tells ‘parallel stories’ of internment
‘Always Running’
Where:Casa 0101 Theater,
2102 E. 1st St., Boyle Heights
When:Saturday to Oct. 20
Tickets:$20-$25
Info:(323) 263-7684,
casa0101.org