Scope and Content Note
The papers of Jeanne Sakata span the years 1942-2010, with the bulk of the material dating between 2007 and 2010. The collection documents her debut play, Dawn's Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi, later retitled Hold These Truths. Material in the collection includes articles, correspondence, essays, flyers, programs, scripts, research materials, and transcripts of oral history interviews.
Dawn's Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi was an interpretation of events that led Gordon Hirabayashi, a Japanese American college student at the University of Washington, to defy Executive Order 9066 during World War II. Material included in the collection consists of primarily research undertaken by Sakata in writing Dawn's Light as well as press and publicity material related to the initial production and several subsequent stagings of the play. Included are a documentary produced and directed by John de Graff and sponsored by the United States Bicentennial Commission about Hirabayashi v. United States, correspondence between Hirabayashi and the Ring family, and correspondence between Sakata and Hirabayashi from 1995. Published and unpublished scripts for the play are included in this collection along with Sakata's transcribed oral history interviews with Hirabayashi. The collection also contains a digital copy of Sakata and actor Ryun Yu's 2007 interview with KPFK Radio in Los Angeles.
Dawn's Light premiered in 2007 at East West Players in Los Angeles, California. It was invited by the New York Theatre Workshop to be showcased at their 2009 Dartmouth Residency. The play has also been performed at Chicago's Pritzker Pavilion as part of the 2011 In the Works New Plays Series; in Epic Theatre Ensemble's 2010 Passion Play Festival with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; at the University of California, Riverside; at the 16th Annual Conference of the Japan Studies Association in Honolulu; and at the Japanese American Citizens League Day of Remembrance events in Sacramento and Salinas, California. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, it was the inspiration and theatrical centerpiece of the civil rights symposium Civil Liberties, National Security, and the Legacies of the Japanese Removal and Incarceration. With the East West Players Theatre for Youth program, Sakata's play has twice toured high schools and junior high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2008 and 2010. In 2012, Epic Theatre Ensemble produced Sakata's retitled play Hold These Truths as a one-character play staged off-Broadway. Material related to many of these stagings is present in the collection.