The Truth
One of the key lines of dialogue in the play—arguably its most oft-quoted line, in fact—is Sheila’s “haunted but gently” delivered recognition of the price that often must be paid to attain a sense of peace during the horrors of war: “…if the only way to get it is to tell the truth, then…” Lying at the heart of the narrative’s thematic approach to power of truth is its natural antipode: concealment of the truth. And there is much going on among all participants in a prison camp that creates the requirement for concealing things to one extent or another.
Surviving Is a Not a Reality Show
Millions if not billions of dollars have been made selling the fiction to millions of fans that being a “survivor” is about outlasting unpleasant, but essentially harmless contestants pretending scripted conflict is real drama. Those who “survived” such TV shows would likely not make it to the end of a sting in a prison camp such as the characters populating this scripted conflict that recreates real drama. Whether interred in camps specifically for those of Japanese descent in America or prisoners of war in the far more brutal camps operated by the Japanese, the real story of being a survivor is told through these historical experiences. There is nothing entertaining about being a prisoner of war and play exposes—not necessarily intentionally, but nonetheless—the vast chasm that exists being a contestant on “Survivor” and its copycats and actually managing to come out alive on the other side of a long stint in bondage under the conditions more horrifying than most can imagine.
War Can Kill as Well as Build Empires
Two countries went into World War II as powerful dynastic empires that had essentially been in charge of significant portions of the planet for the better part of the previous couple of centuries or so. By the time the new kid in town dropped two atomic bombs on one of those nations, the sun had basically set on both empires. As the twentieth century dawned, Britons like to boast that the sun never set on its empire. Eerily enough, on the opposite of the world, another very small island nation was flexing an influence that far surpassed the limitations of their own geography. The Japanese Empire may not ever have been quite the equal of the British Empire, but had just a few things gone just a little differently in the mid-1940’s, that empire might today have made the British look like pure amateurs. What happened instead, of course, was ultimately a brutal form of karma heaped upon two countries that had never shied away from using oppression and force to build their dreams of patriarchal power. A war that might well have solidified both empires as easily it might have left one in tatters and the other stronger than ever wound up dismantling both and that history lesson takes an allegorical form as a theme to be pursued in the narrative trek of the play.
