STAGE REVIEW : ‘12-1-A’ Looks at Life in Internment Camps

Wakako Yamauchi’s “12-1-A,” at UCLA’s Ralph Freud Playhouse, is a play that deals in a stark subject--the Japanese-American citizens imprisoned at internment camps during World War II. So we will put it starkly: “12-1-A” is a very small play on a very large set.

This East West Players-UCLA Theatre Arts Department co-production has all the characteristics of both entities: The East West tradition of class and weakness for kitchen-sink material; UCLA’s tradition of producing skilled student actors who do their level best when thrust into a professional situation. Here, a large group of (mostly) Asian-American student actors working with a small core of East West veterans (artistic director Nobu McCarthy, Dian Kobayashi and Lloyd Kino) carry their weight with real dignity--even when they can’t always be heard in the large Freud house.

The mix of elders and youngsters adds another element to Yamauchi’s perspective on the camps--that it was filled with Nisei youth who were on the verge of making something with their lives, now cast into a barren place threatening to dry up their life juices. (The Issei adults are either already dried up, or barely hanging on.) This, and Victoria Petrovich’s huge set, with several barracks and a guard tower reportedly built to actual scale, add invigorating elements that might not have been there when “12-1-A” first appeared at East West 10 years ago.

But despite a laudable humanism and resistance to easy polemics, the play remains grounded by a slice-of-life plainness not helped by director Rodney Kageyama’s slack pace. Then again, Yamauchi has her own pacing problems, spending far too much time establishing the Tanaka family (Garrett Richard Wang’s willful Mitch, McCarthy’s pliant mother and Melissa Chan’s alienated young daughter, Koko), the folks in neighboring barrack 12-1-B (Kobayashi’s put-upon Mrs. Ichioka and Jeff Liu’s patriotic son, Ken) and other camp characters (Yau-Gene Chan’s Harry, a kind, slow-witted cousin of Steinbeck’s Lennie, and Regina Santos’ hip, cynical Yo).

It isn’t until Act II that Yamauchi finds the right button to build up the pressure in this desert prison, and it’s about the choices the inmates make: Ken’s, to work for the authorities and join the Army; Mitch’s, to refuse to sign up for war duty; Mrs. Tanaka’s, to keep the family together. It permits everyone their point of view, and their moment of emotional release, but there is also the sense of a writer giving each of her characters an equal quota of time, an overly neat tendency to balance the dramatic books. The camps could not have been nearly so tidy.

The emotional core does finally emerge, though Kageyama and company have only begun to touch its heart. But it’s subsumed by a bigger desire to make a well-made play, which ironically holds the play back from its goal as a wake-up call to Americans ignorant of this black national chapter.

* “12-1-A,” Ralph Freud Playhouse, UCLA, near Hilgard and Sunset, West Los Angeles. Thursday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Sunday. $13; (310) 825-2101. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.