Linked with chatty narration by the amiable Ben (Jon Norman Schneider), blunt but usually poignant scenes chronicle the Uchida family members' ordeal: their bewildered realization that they are suddenly aliens in their own country their dazed attempts to pack their receipt of an anonymous identification number, 13559 their arrival at the Mirror Lake Internment Camp, where they battle dust and roaches, surrounded by desert and barbed wire. It's like even the air around you changes."īen's encounter with this truth - and with the realities of war and prejudice - unfurls briskly at the Kennedy Center Family Theater in Naomi Iizuka's hour-long play for children, based on the book by Barry Denenberg. "Sometimes your whole life changes in a flash," Ben writes in his journal after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That's what happens to Ben Uchida, 12, and his family when they and other Japanese Americans are forced into a World War II internment camp. The colors that flood the backdrop of "Citizen 13559: The Journal of Ben Uchida" symbolize one of this new play's unnerving insights: that in an instant, familiar reality can mutate into something strange and frightening.
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