EMPIRE OF THE SON
Playwright acts out a fraught relationship with his father
When Vancouver playwright and actor Tetsuro Shigematsu was preparing last year to debut Empire of the Son, his one-man show about his fraught relationship with his emotionally distant father Akira, he struck a deal with his stage manager. If the stage manager were to get news in the middle of a performance that Akira, who was gravely ill at the time, had died, the stage manager was to come on stage and tell Shigematsu so he could share the fact with the audience.“It was important to me keep the show as realistic as possible,” says Shigematsu. In fact, in the run-up to the premiere, he kept changing the play to reflect his father’s deterioration. Instead of using poetic licence in telling the story, “For once in my life, I was telling things exactly as they happened, and they just seemed to have their own power.”
As it turned out, his father died 18 days before the play premièred, and Shigematsu had to rewrite, yet again, parts of the show. He locked down the script, which doesn’t mean he’s yet locked down his relationship with his father, just four days before the show opened.
The multimedia production, at the National Arts Centre (starting Tuesday), traces his father’s life from his youth in wartime Japan to his immigration to the west, including a stint working as a radio broadcaster at the BBC and, later, at the CBC, where he wound up hosting an immensely popular show before funding cuts forced him from the broadcast booth into the mail room. The playwright, now 45 and himself a former host of the CBC radio show The Roundup, says he thinks the only time his father felt truly satisfied was when he lived in Britain.
In the play, Shigematsu explores how language, culture, history and
I never cried because my father never cried because his father never cried. I hoped the show would break the cycle.
the similarity between his father and him kept the two apart. Like many men of his generation and culture, the elder Shigematsu kept his emotions under wraps, never talking with or hugging his son or telling him he loved him. It was a habit of life that his son, as sons often do, absorbed as his own.
“We never touched each other, but when he was dying we became intimate in terms of my cleaning him, changing his diaper,” says Shigematsu. “When he died, my hands were on his body.”
Shigematsu says he didn’t cry over his father’s death, something his own young children noticed. They asked him if he’d ever wept as an adult and the truth was, he hadn’t. “I never cried because my father never cried because his father never cried,” he says. “I hoped the show would break the cycle. It has tenderized me. Sometimes during the performance my eyes well up, but when I think of crying like a kid, all out with snot running — no, I’ve never gotten there. Not yet.”
Shigematsu had dug into this complex relationship with his father in a much earlier play, Rising Son. The show was seen by only 100 or so people, and Shigematsu says his father reacted badly to it. “My mom told me one day at the kitchen table, ‘Your dad says you’re making fun of his accent for a living’.”
For Empire of the Son, the playwright decided to ask his father’s permission to tell his story in public. His father was initially baffled about why anyone else would be interested in his life, but did grant permission. When Shigematsu asked why he’d done so, his father said, “‘If you share my story, then my life will have had some meaning ’.”
It was, for the playwright, a revelation that his father, the man to whom he’d habitually looked for validation, was himself seeking the same. Sharing the story over the past year has meant a continuation of his relationship with his now-deceased father, according to Shigematsu. Waiting to go on stage, “I feel like I’m on the threshold of a kind of a seance. It’s a little bit of a scary thing to be waiting in the wings and wondering to what degree I’ll feel his spirit, the power of his memories coursing through my body.”