Small business reveals big life in followup to Empire of the Son
It all started with a coffee mug.
When Tetsuro Shigematsu spied the receptacle emblazoned with the words Japan Camera at the home of his producer Donna Yamamoto, his curiosity was piqued.
When he found out that the Yamamoto family business had been the one-hour photo finishing franchise of the same name, the performer/writer behind the 2015 hit Empire of the Son thought he might have his next project.
But then, upon talking to Yamamoto’s father Mas, the idea of doing a play about the family business took a back seat.
“As a child he grew up on the banks of the Fraser River,” Shigematsu said.
“His father was a fisherman. Then, during the Second World War, as a teenager, his family was interned. The story of his internment, his activities during the Cold War when he was helping build the Distant Early Warning Line (a system of radar stations) up in the Arctic — there were so many great stories that I couldn’t remain focused on the 1980s, which is when he was running Japan Camera.”
Empire of the Son, about Shigematsu’s relationship with his own father, received six Jessie Award nominations for its initial run. That success led to a remount in Vancouver last year, as well as a tour across the country.
For his followup, Shigematsu is returning to some of the techniques he used for the previous work. A former writer for This Hour Has 22 Minutes, as well as a CBC Radio announcer, he is again working with miniatures and film. He’s also incorporating audio clips of Mas Shigematsu’s quotes and stories from 36 hours of interviews he conducted with the nonagenarian.
“At one point I was going to play Mas,” Shigematsu said. “But what we realized when we played excerpts of the recordings to workshop audiences is that people really fell in love with his voice. Not just because he has a really deep rich resonant voice, but because we don’t often hear people of his age in this particular context. We tend to only hear people’s voices when they’re at the peak of their lives. But to hear the timbre of his voice suffused with all of his life experience and the colours that are present within his voice as he expresses different emotions as
he’s recalling and reliving different events, his voice almost becomes a musical instrument. We decided we’d better let that play on its own.”
Shigematsu edited those hours of interviews down to 18 minutes, and pressed them onto vinyl.
“The show is almost like a listening party. We play brief tracks from the interviews.”
Shigematsu is the sole performer of the Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre production. His team includes a sound designer, Steve Charles, and a video designer, Jamie Nesbitt. Richard Wolfe, artistic director of Pi Theatre, is directing.
To draw the audience into Mas’ world, a GoPro camera will explore miniatures built by Susan Miyagishima, such as a scale model of the Yamamoto home.
“It’s taking our whole team in the room to figure out how to best do that,” he said. “We’re trying to deepen the experience of listening by allowing the audience to look at different things to enable their imaginations to take flight.”
With so much material to draw from, Shigematsu has had to be judicious in what he included. One story that struck him, and that remains in the show, comes from the time of Mas’ internment. While in the camp, the 14-year-old fell in love. What happens between the teenage Mas and the girl is one of the plot threads in 1 Hour Photo.
Shigematsu sums up that story’s theme: “For all these elaborate evils that humankind can engineer to make adults despair and children sad, there has yet to be a scenario so depressing that young love cannot transcend it.”