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by Hiro Kanagawa, directed by Stafford Arima

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

June 18-September 27, 2025

“And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses” (Mark 11:25)

Of the eight shows that have opened so far at the Stratford Festival, three are adaptations of prose narratives. The most successful of these is Forgiveness by Hiro Kanagawa adapted from the 2014 memoir Forgiveness: A Gift from my Grandparents by Mark Sakamoto. The play focusses on two of Sakamoto’s grandparents – Ralph MacLean, his mother’s father, and Mitsue Sakamoto, his father’s mother. Both Canadians were interned during World War II on different continents, yet both were able to place their personal suffering within a larger framework and to forgive their captors. This is a moving and inspiring story filled with passionate performances from the entire cast.

The central event of the action is a dinner party at the Sakamotos in Medicine Hat in the 1970s. Stan Sakamoto, son of Mitsue, has been dating Diane MacLean, daughter of Ralph. The feelings of the two are serious enough that Stan feels it’s time that his parents meet Diane’s parents. Much comic fuss is made over what Mitsue should cook for the MacLeans. She knows that Ralph was a prisoner of war in Japan and thinks she should not make Japanese food, even though that is her forte. Beneath this comedy is the larger concern of what Ralph, who fought the Japanese and suffered under them, will think of dining with a Japanese family.

In actor/playwright Hiro Kanagawa’s adaption, the action shifts between questions about the dinner party in the 1970s and various events in the past of Mitsue and Ralph. Ralph grows up on the Magdalen Islands with his best friends Coop and Deighton. He can’t stand his alcoholic father and hopes to move away as soon as possible. When war is declared and an enlistment officer arrives, Ralph lies about his age to join the army with his friends. All he hopes for is adventure and escape.

Interleaved with Ralph’s story is that of Mitsue. Mitsue’s parents immigrated from Japan but Mitsue was born in Canada and lives with her parents in BC. Although Mitsue would like to become a teacher, her parents say they do not have enough money to pay for her education and wonder, given the prejudice against Asians in BC, who would even hire her. To make use of one of her skills, Mitsue becomes a seamstress. Meanwhile, her parents line up various suitors since they think marriage is Mitsue’s only secure option in life. As it happens, a young man Hideo, who is as interested in books as Mitsue is, becomes attracted to Mitsue and the two fall in love.

The advent of war in the Pacific brings hardship to both Ralph and Mitsue. Ralph spends most of the war as a prisoner. He is captured in Hong Kong and placed in a prisoner of war camp. He is later sent to a slave labour camp in Japan itself. While his comrades die due to the harsh conditions, Ralph is chosen to act as a servant to the camp’s psychotic commander.

As for Mitsue, who marries Hideo, conditions for her and her family become especially bad after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941. From 1942 to 1949 the Canadian government relocated Japanese Canadians from the coast of BC to the Prairies for the sake of “national security”. Mitsue’s family and Hideo have their businesses and homes taken away and are sent to live and work on farm in Alberta. They are forced to live in a chicken coop and pick sugar beets from dawn to dusk every day for token payment. Mitsue, who had become pregnant before her internment, fears for her parents, husband and her future child.

How both Ralph and Mitsue manage to survive both physically and psychologically is the main emphasis of the play’s second act. Key to their survival is that they are both Christians. One should note that at the time of the action, the term “Christian” was not as much associated with right-wing politics or authoritarianism. Instead, the type of Christianity followed by Ralph and Mitsue was based on the New Testament, not the Old – on forgiveness, not revenge. The passage of the Bible that Ralph returns to is Mark 11:25: “And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses”. In fact, before Diane is even married, Ralph asks her to name any male child she should have Mark, in honour of this passage. And indeed, it is Diane’s child, Mark Sakamoto, who is the author of the memoir the play is based on.

There are difficulties both with the play itself and with the production. The problem with Kanagawa’s text is that its first act is very hard to follow. It jumps so often between the 1970s and various points in the past that it is not immediately clear whether an actor like Jeff Lillico is playing different characters or the same character at different times. As it happens, Lillico is playing himself at different times in his life, but many other actors are playing different characters. The second act where events proceed in chronological order is much easier to follow.

As for the production, Stafford Arima’s use of Sammy Chien’s projections is constantly distracting. For the first time in a show in the Tom Patterson Theatre, images are projected not only on the back wall of the thrust stage but on the long walls on the north and south sides of the auditorium above the audience seating. The hand-drawn animation Cindy Mochizuki has created are attractive in themselves but totally unnecessary for the storytelling. Why, when we see the Sakamotos’ kitchen, do we have to see the pendulum moving on the wall clock? Why, when Mitsue and her family are relocated to Alberta, do we have to see an animated train running across the side wall? Why, when Mitsue and her family return to BC, do we have to see an animated train running across the side wall in the opposite direction? Projections featuring motion are distracting in the theatre. Projections featuring motion that force us to glance away from the stage are doubly distracting. I really hope never to see projections on the side walls of the Patterson again.

Luckily, the performances in Forgiveness are so good they make it easier to block out the projections mentally. The two actors who carry the show are Jeff Lillico as Ralph and Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue. Lillico has given fine performances in many plays over the years, but the role of Ralph is the largest and most complex role he has ever had. He is simply outstanding. Lillico successfully portrays Ralph at several different ages from childhood to late middle age with changes of voice and movement appropriate to each age. His character often finds himself in extremis but forced to restrain himself for fear of be killed. Here Lillico is particularly excellent. The same is true when Ralph is assigned to Kato, the commandant of the slave labour camp in Japan whose personality can chance from one minute to the next and who loves to taunt Ralph. Though Ralph is restricted to one-word replies in Japanese, Lillico is able to convey the thoughts Ralph is thinking that he knows he must keep hidden.

Yoshie Bancroft, making her Stratford debut, has been with Forgiveness from its premiere in 2023 in Vancouver. She is a luminous Mitsue, glowing with kindness, the love of life, sympathy and righteous anger. As the middle-aged Mitsue, mother of two boys, she brings out all the comedy in what to cook for “hakujin” (白人, i.e., “White people”) like the MacLeans. Elsewhere, Bancroft makes Mitsue an inspiring figure who copes with each blow fate gives her by trying to turn it to an advantage. Bancroft plays Mitsue as resilient but not immune from suffering.

Kanagawa’s adaptation spends little time on Ralph’s wife Darlene, well played by Jacklyn Francis, and focusses much more on Mitsue’s eventual husband Hideo. He gives us the entire story of their courtship, from Hideo’s spying on Mitsue as she works in a dress shop to their marriage and internment together, to their contented life as a middle-aged couple. Michael Man turns Hideo into one of the most enjoyable characters of the play. Man is excellent at depicting Hideo’s shyness combined with an excess of emotion that leaves him tongue-tied. Man makes Hideo’s progress from awkwardness to assurance vis-à-vis Mitsue one of the play’s highlights.

In other roles, the playwright Hiro Kanagawa gives a gives a sympathetic performance as Mitsue’s father, while Minami Hara portrays Mitsue’s mother as anxiety-ridden in the past and not free of prejudice against hakujin in the 1970s. Kanagawa also plays the slave camp commandant Kato, who totally unlike Mitsue’s father, is frightening and aggressive.

Gabriel Antonacci and Joe Perry make a strong impression as Ralph’s two friends Coop and Deighton, who travel with him into battle in Asia. Both actors contrast their macho behaviour as young men with their terror as soldiers at war. Both give their death scenes an emotional intensity that is hard to watch.

As Mark Sakamoto’s parents, Douglas Oyama plays Stan and Allison Lynch is Diane. Both exhibit a free and easy way of living far different from the struggles we see their parents and grandparents endure. Yet, both demonstrate that even if Stan and Diane never really understand what their parents’ lives were like, they still command their respect.

While Mark Sakamoto was concerned mostly to portray the triumph of his grandparent over adversity and Hiro Kanagawa to reflect this story on stage, it is hard for a present-day audience to see only a fascinating family saga in Forgiveness. When the play premiered in 2023, one couldn’t have known that the antique rhetoric concerning “undesirable aliens” would return with such force in our neighbour to the south and that these aliens would be placed in internment camps or forcibly deported. Kanagawa’s play depicts the lives of people who reach a happy ending because they are able to forgive. What make the play so relevant today is that we live in a time when notions of mercy or forgiveness are openly mocked. The play Forgiveness now serves as template for respectful behaviour that stands in stark contrast to the actions of those in power today.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Jeff Lillico as Ralph (foreground) with Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue (background); Jeff Lillico as Ralph (foreground) with Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue (background); Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue; Michael Man as Hideo and Yoshie Bancroft as Mitsue. © 2025 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.