LIA CHANG
Joel de la Fuente stars in “Hold These Truths.”
As audience members take their seats at “Hold These Truths,” currently playing at Luna Stage in West Orange, actor Joel de la Fuente sits quietly among them, doing nothing to draw attention to himself. When it is time for the play to begin, he simply walks to the stage and starts talking, with the house lights on.
It is a fitting opening to a play about the most unassuming of heroes — a man whose story of racial persecution and principled defiance remains sadly relevant to those now living in the Age of ICE. What happened to him could very easily happen to someone in 2026.
This one-man play — written by Jeanne Sakata, first produced (with a different title) in 2007, and directed here by Lisa Rothe — is about Gordon Hirabayashi (1918-2012), who challenged the internment of Japanese-Americans such as himself during World War II, and took his case all the way to The Supreme Court. He lost, but his conviction was later overturned, and he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
After a brief introductory talk that touches on The Declaration of Independence, the house lights go down. And in the course of the play, the hard-working de la Fuente plays more than 30 characters, changing accents and mannerisms or using props to distinguish each one. But “Hold These Truths” is still, basically, a monologue: Hirabayashi’s life story — and his reflections on what he has been through — with de la Fuente acting out the characters as Hirabayashi remembers them.
And it is quite a story.
Hirabayashi, a second-generation Japanese-American, was a college student in Washington state when World War II began. He is portrayed, in this part of the play, as a wide-eyed innocent, believing deeply in the American Dream despite the fact that he frequently encounters discrimination. As a child, he says, he had seen signs in stores like “Japs Keep Out” and “Japs Not Welcome Here.” And at college, he is not allowed to join a fraternity and is turned away at “hotels, restaurants, swimming pools, the orchestra section of The Bijou, where we’re banished to the balcony.”
But he is still jumps into college life enthusiastically, joining clubs and other organizations and becoming active in the college’s Quaker community (his parents were members of a Japanese Christian sect that is similar to the Quakers in some ways). In 1940, he travels to New York to participate in a YMCA Leadership Training Program; he is intoxicated by everything the city has to offer, and amazed that there doesn’t seem to be any discrimination in this bustling, urban melting pot. “I’m feeling as if some huge weight has lifted off my chest,” he says. “I’m feeling a new surge of endless possibilities. I’m feeling as if I finally joined the human race.”
KEVIN BERNE
Joel de la Fuente in “Hold These Truths.”
Soon, though, he has to go back to Washington, where he applies for conscientious objector status in the draft. He is broke, and tries to get a job at the local Y, but is turned down, told that donors might not like that the Y has hired “someone like you.”
Then Pearl Harbor is bombed, and Hirabayashi has more to worry about than discrimination. Japanese-American are now in physical danger. “Reports come flooding in: smashed windows, death threats, houses set on fire,” Hirabayashi says. Japanese-Americans, living peacefully here, start getting arrested.
“Our faces are the faces of the enemy,” Hirabayashi cries out with anguish.
A curfew is instituted for those of Japanese ancestry. He follows it. But then one day, he doesn’t. “I was born here, raised here. I’m an American citizen,” he thinks.
He suffers no immediate repercussions. But soon it is announced that all Japanese-Americans — anyone who is at least one sixteenth Japanese — will be “evacuated.” There is mass confusion. Hirabayashi drops out of college and starts helping his family, and others. When it is him time to go, he formally refuses the order of evacuation, and is arrested.
He doesn’t have the resources for a legal battle, but gets some help from the ACLU and other organizations. The case receives national attention, but the Supreme Court ultimately decides against him.
He serves his time, then gets into another legal battle, claiming that a questionnaire demanding that Japanese-Americans denounce their allegiance to the emperor of Japan was discriminatory. He loses again, though the decision is not unanimous this time, and he sees that as a glimmer of hope.
He serves more time, then gets on with his life. He marries and has children, and becomes a sociology professor, teaching in Canada, Lebanon and Egypt. An one day, in the ’80s, he gets a call from a law professor, out of the blue, telling him a “smoking gun” has been found: documents showing the government knew there was no military necessity for Japanese-American internment, and that it was clearly racism.
“I tell him, ‘I’ve been waiting for your call for 40 years,’ ” Hirabayashi says.
His conviction is finally overturned.
The house lights come back on at the end of the play, and the monologue returns to The Declaration of Independence, and its assertion that all men are created equal.
“I am somewhat aware of what was — and is,” he says, tying the play’s content to the present. “I have a glimpse at what ought to be. I seek to live as though the ought to be, is.”
Luna Stage will present “Hold These Truths” through Oct. 18. Visit lunastage.org.
For more on the play, visit holdthesetruths.info.
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