I’m grateful to the Seattle Rep and artistic director Dámaso Rodriguez for another opportunity to develop the script for this new stage adaptation of John Okada’s No-No Boy.
Through its New Works program, the Rep is hosting a four-day workshop with live actors on the week of May 5. On the evening of the fourth day, we’ll get the play up on its feet, and tickets are now sold out for this public reading on Thursday, May 8, at 7:30 pm in the Rep’s 114-seat PONCHO Forum.
I’m also fortunate to have the workshop be led by director Leslie Ishii. Not only is she coming off her recent wins of the Paul Robeson Award from Actors’ Equity Association and Actors’ Equity Foundation, and the Zelda Fichandler Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, Leslie carries with her the experience of incarceration in the community, through her work with Tsuru for Solidarity, and in her family, which includes the late James and Misao Sakamoto. She’s also the niece of the late David Ishii Bookseller, who preserved the legacy of John Okada as much as anyone and framed a portrait of Okada that greeted visitors to his legendary Pioneer Square bookshop.
With the expert guidance of the Rep’s Shawna Grajek, we’ve just completed casting of the roles and have assembled a kind of dream team to work with around the table. To help us develop the role of Pa, 
we have Asian American theater and Hollywood veteran Keone Young, “Mr. Wu” of Deadwood fame and a protege of both Mako and Frank Chin. Keone tells me this workshop is special to him because he and Mako wanted to produce this play in the 1980s but were unable to secure the rights. Keone also does an exceptional job reading the Issei and Kibei Nisei literature in the audiobook of our Penguin Classics anthology, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration.
Emily Kuroda (Ma) is another veteran of Asian American theater and the film/TV industry in Los Angeles. Her regional theater credits include Actors Theatre of Louisville, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, New York Theatre Workshop, and she recently appeared as Mrs. Antrobus in Seattle Rep’s season-opener, The Skin of Our Teeth.
The burden of the central role of Ichiro will be carried by actor/playwright/poet and performance artist Ken Yoshikawa of Portland. Ken wrote and performed his own solo show, The Art of Flyswatting, off-Broadway at the Pan Asian Repertory in New York.
Rounding out the cast are Josh Kenji as, coincidentally enough, Kenji, the wounded Nisei veteran who befriends and guides Ichiro; Alegra Batara as Emi, the woman who forms an intimate bond with the stranger Kenji brings to her home; and Michael Wu as Freddie and Taro.
This workshop is made possible by supporters of the Rep’s New Works Program, along with a grant from the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation. Thanks to you all.
Thanks also to the nearly 30 attendees who came to listen to our panel on April 17 at the Association for Asian American Studies annual conference in Boston, “Interpreting Japanese American Incarceration in the 21st Century Through Alternative Methods,” where I shared some of the challenges of re-envisioning a midcentury American novel for an audience in 2025.
