If you shake your head in dismay at the universally dismal experience of Japanese Canadians consigned to internment camps during World War Two, you’re making the same mistake as those who consigned them to the camps in the first place.
To wit: painting individuals with a collective brush.
That’s one of the messages of this subtle and affecting piece of verbatim theatre by two performers whose families were interned.
Seeking to unlock that part of their heritage, Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa interviewed dozens of Nisei or second-generation Japanese Canadians who, now in their 70s and 80s, were children when interned at Tashme, the largest camp in British Columbia. They then used the Nisei’s own words to fashion a picture of life in the camps and afterward.
That picture is as diverse as human nature itself.
Taking on the voices and gestures of those interviewed, Miwa and Manning – both of them robust actors – show us children delightedly playing marbles, living in freezing shacks with no running water, marvelling at the gorgeous mountain setting, losing parents and siblings to death……..(read more) 

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Theatre+review+Thoughtful+moving+portrayal+depicts+lives+interned/9506311/story.html

Published in the Ottawa Citizen by Patrick Langston

Published in the Ottawa Citizen, February 14.

Anthony Johnston, Nathan Schwartz

Photo by Lili Jamali

OTTAWA — Be careful what you wish for: it may lead you into territory where your reality splinters, and you face questions more complicated than you’d ever anticipated.

That was the experience of best buddies Anthony Johnston and Nathan Schwartz — or at least it seems to have been the experience, reality being a moving target in this rambunctious and sometimes very brave play. A decade ago the two, one gay and one straight, were fresh graduates from theatre school wanting work. They wrote a prank letter to a fundamentalist organization in rural British Columbia that had as its mission the reformation of gays. In the letter they asked for funds to develop a new play Never Cry Wolfman.

To their surprise, they were invited to workshop the show, which didn’t actually exist, as long as they participated in gay conversion therapy.

They agreed, and A Quiet Sip of Coffee is the play that resulted from a lark about a play.

Under the direction of Annie Tippe, the two use video, music, improvisation and storytelling to root around weighty issues like authenticity, self-delusion and friendship, mostly staying on this side of the earnestness such topics invite……

(read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/GCTC+Undercurrents+Review+coffee+rings+true/9511015/story.html