‘Star Trek’ legend Takei stars in weightier fare on Broadway
THE Broadway stage is awash in blue and gold, illuminating a guard tower, a distant mountain and a barbed-wire fence. Openly-gay actor George Takei, playing an old man in a drab sweater, urges Lea Salonga, a pretty young woman in a patterned dress, to go to a dance. She tells him that nothing blooms at Heart Mountain. He smiles, holds up a handmade paper flower and says, “Wanna bet?”
At 78, the “Star Trek” actor is making his Broadway debut in “Allegiance,” a musical based on his memories of his confinement as a young boy at another Japanese internment camp, in Rohwer, Arkansas.
Takei plays two characters: a grandfather in the 1940s who tries to cheer up his fellow detainees and an elderly World War II veteran in the present.
As a young man, his character enlists in the Army to prove the family’s loyalty; Salonga, who plays his sister, joins draft resisters fighting for their rights. Their divided loyalties threaten to tear them apart.
Director Stafford Arima describes the story as “uniquely American... the tale of a family who goes through a transformation during a rich and tumultuous time in American history.”
Takei views the play as a tribute to his family. As a teenager, he accused his father of leading them to the camp “like sleep to slaughter” and has regretted it ever since because he never got to say he was sorry before his father died.
At the first rehearsal, Takei talked about camp life and how his father’s answers on a government loyalty questionnaire got the family in trouble. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the room,” says actress Katie Rose Clarke.
Takei is well-known for his role as Sulu on “Star Trek” and for his gay rights activism. But he also narrated an exhibition at Rohwer and helped start the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, donating a desk that a detainee built for his father. In his mind, he says, there was never a question that the Eaton collection of camp artwork belongs at the museum.
Although the camps are making an effort to build interpretive centers, Takei says, “they are all in the boondocks. Only a fraction of people visiting our museum would be visiting those places.”
“We are in the heart of the second-most-populous city in America. It’s an important story - and an American story.”