FIRE IN THE NEW WORLD
Dramaturgy Notes
Fire in the New World is a seriocomic, noir-style detective story featuring the intrepid private eye, Sam Shikaze, and his cohort of friends and allies. But the central crime narrative involving Sam’s reluctantly working for a predatory, powerful, and racist corporate scion, whose passion is to “make the neighborhood great again,” is woven together with binding historical threads spun out of the World War II internment of Japanese Canadians.
It is 1963, 20 years after the forced exclusion and internment of Japanese Canadians in inland camps following Pearl Harbor. In the rundown neighborhood around Powell Street, there are only remnants of Vancouver’s Japantown, the once-vibrant hub of the pre-war Japanese Canadian community, which has never fully recovered from the government’s permanent dispossession of the community.
The small number of former internees who had returned with hopes of reclaiming, rebuilding, and recovering the life and spirit of prewar Japantown embody the complex traces of Japanese Canadians’ displacement and expropriation, but equally, their strength, resistance, and resilience in the face of ongoing White supremacy.
1939: Powell Street with a lightpost emblazoned with the Union Jack. (Vancouver Archives)
The intersections of White hegemony, systemic racism, extant British imperialism, governmental confiscation through eminent domain, and insatiable capitalist profiteering were as present in 1960s Canada, as they were prior to the internment and as they still remain today. In this sense, Roderic Alexander’s rapacious scheming and manipulation, incorporating racism, sexism, and xenophobia, all in the service of greed and power, and the elimination of the Japanese Canadian community, personify the insidious merging of these historical forces.
Set in 1963, Fire in the New World occupies, chronologically, the middle of The Sam Shikaze Trilogy by Rick Shiomi, bookended by Rosie’s Café, set in 1951, and Yellow Fever in 1973. Over the three-play cycle, Shiomi examines the trajectory of the Japanese Canadian experience from the post-war era to the beginnings of the Redress and Reparations Campaign in the 1970s, which was part of a revival of the Japanese Canadian community in Vancouver and across Canada. Enmeshed in the ongoing afterlife of the Japanese Canadian internment, the trilogy serves as a living witness and eloquent voice of social justice.
Fire in the New World and its two companion plays presciently capture the present-day admonition, “Never Again Is Now.” Embraced by manifold social justice coalitions, Never Again Is Now articulates the lived reality that watershed historical events and their complex afterlives continue to inform, conform, and deform our current thinking and practices, targeting the lives of marginalized peoples. In the end, Fire in the New World interrogates how the Japanese Canadian internment demands that we face up to our accountability, individually and collectively, to confront and mitigate the fire ignited by the real and present dangers of an increasingly regressive and authoritarian New World order. What is our ethical and moral responsibility to bear witness and intervene? How do we organize and mobilize communities to take direct action? What is our/your/my mandate to advance justice in a world where Never Again Is Now?
– Gordon Nakagawa, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor, Communication Studies & Asian American Studies California State University, Northridge
Ellen Fenster, a professional theater director and arts educator in Minneapolis. Ellen has directed at Pillsbury House Theatre, The Illusion Theater, Yellow Tree Theater, Theatre Mu, Artistry, Gremlin Theatre, U of MN/Guthrie Theater Actor Training Program and Park Square Theater. She is an associate artist at Pillsbury House Theatre where she ran the Chicago Avenue Project from 2008 to 2016. She is also an artistic associate at Illusion Theatre where she helps connect the theater with young and emerging artists. She is currently the Artistic and Executive Director of Twin Cities Theater Camp, a summer theater intensive for children.
Rick Shiomi, a founding member and the Co-Artistic Director of Full Circle Theater. He has been a playwright, director and artistic director in the Asian American theater movement since the 1980s and was a co-founder of Theater Mu and Artistic Director for twenty years. His twenty plays include Mask Dance, Rosie’s Café and Yellow Fever. His directing credits include: 
Kim Vasquez, a Saint Paul native specializing in the development of new plays and musicals. She is currently a producer on Be More Chill (Chicago, London, Broadway and Off-Broadway) and Austen’s Pride. Kim is a proud Founding Producer for the currently defunct New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF), which survived for a glorious 16 years. Her most recent directing credit was for the New York Times bestselling Author and Poet, Rupi Kaur, in a live theatrical production of The Sun And Her Flowers at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center.
