Featured Playwright — Carolyn Nakagawa
Each month we interview member playwrights to share their work, stories and inspiration with the community. We recently spoke with Carolyn Nakagawa, a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian poet and playwright who makes her home in the territory colonized as Vancouver, BC.
She is currently developing The New Canadians, a musical with composer Peter Abando, about the true story of a grassroots Japanese Canadian newspaper whose young staff must lead their community through being forcibly uprooted to internment camps. Mieko Ouchi directed a workshop of The New Canadians presented in association with Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre in 2024. She is also working on Anne’s Cradle, a commission from the Confederation Centre of the Arts which tells the story of Hanako Muraoka, the first person to translate Anne of Green Gables into Japanese.
Tell us how you got your start writing plays.
I always wanted to be a writer from the time I understood that the books I wrote were created by another person. My high school had a unique drama program where the teacher, Richard Dixon, wrote original 1-hour ensemble-cast scripts for every cast to perform; in grade 12, I took an independent study with him to learn how to write plays. From there, I participated in the Vancouver Playhouse Young Playwrights’ program, mentored by Amiel Gladstone, who directed presentations of our short scenes performed by professional actors. The thrill of having other artists interpret my words and enhance them through performance got me hooked.
You’ve identified history and research as central parts of your creative practice. How do you balance including real events in a fictionalized story, and maintaining historical accuracy without getting bogged down in minutiae?
The real events are a great starting point because at least in the stories I’ve worked on, they’re often better than anything I could have made up. But sometimes there’s a need to simplify in order to keep the audience from getting bogged down in details outside of the main story I’m trying to tell, or to play with things like order and timing of events to keep the story engaging. Thinking about the real people I’m writing about helps me to guide my decisions; if I’m going a bit outside of what actually happened in some way, I ask myself, is this still true to the people involved, as I understand them? If it doesn’t affect their characters, or if it helps to highlight certain important things about them, then it’s a small adjustment that’s worth the enhancement to the dramatic action.
What does your process look like when you’re conducting research for a writing project, as with Anne’s Cradle, your play about the Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables?
When I interviewed Mieko Ouchi for a PGC event in 2020, she said that every time she writes a play she feels like she is learning how to write a play all over again. It was really validating to hear an established artist say this, because it’s also how I feel whenever I start a new work. Every story has different circumstances and needs, whether or not it involves research, though most of mine do.
Anne’s Cradle is special because it’s an adaptation of a wonderful, well-researched book by Eri Muraoka, so the research was already gathered for me. I also read Mary Henley Rubio’s biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Hanako Muraoka’s translation of Anne of Green Gables.
For my other work-in-progress, The New Canadians, I read every issue of The New Canadian newspaper from 1938 to mid-1945, and interviewed about 30 different people with various connections to the story. I try to take notes that will help me find things later on when I think of them and want to use them, which is especially helpful years after the initial research; but the first gathering of information is mostly about immersing myself in the source material and searching for the central things that I want to shape my version of the story around. Once I start writing — and continue with rewrites — I’ll periodically revisit my notes or find new things to look into as the scope of the story develops.
You have explored experiences of Japanese diaspora through your work. How has this been reflected in your work, and how has it evolved over time?
As a teenager and early twenty-something writing my first plays, I didn’t write about race. All my characters were open to colour-blind casting. My first professional reading was with Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre and they were fully supportive of any ideas I wanted to explore as a writer, whether or not those ideas were “Asian”. We had a fabulous all-Asian-Canadian cast, but the play could have been performed by anyone. Being embraced by that community in that way, having them take real interest in my artistic voice, meant a lot to me. This connection also meant that I got to know many talented Asian Canadian actors and wanted to write parts for them.
Ironically, getting this open-ended support and encouragement ended up inspiring me to ask myself what my Asian Canadian play would be about. That was my next play workshopped by VACT, called The Girl with No Face, which was about being racialized third- or fourth-generation Asian Canadian and having that identity removed from experiences of immigration. At that time I was getting to know more about history, which has opened up new dimensions to my work beyond my immediate lived experiences, although I still connect these stories back to my own perspective.
What are your goals as a playwright moving forward?
I have two very ambitious projects in development at the moment, so my goal is to see them both fully staged. The New Canadians has developed alongside me learning how to get artist grants and produce workshops, but as a musical, it’s a bigger show than I can take to a full premiere on my own. My goal is to find the right producers that recognize the importance of the story and are willing to find the partnerships and resources to make it happen. Artistically, we’ve made some incredible discoveries in our workshops so far and I hope we continue to do justice to the true story we’re adapting for the stage.
For Anne’s Cradle, I’m very fortunate to have it commissioned by the Confederation Centre of the Arts, so I’m learning a lot from working with them. Again, my primary artistic goal is to do justice to the incredible story of Hanako Muraoka. It’s also a bilingual play, in both English and Japanese. I see it as a play that is in some ways about the Japanese language, since it’s so centred around the act of translating a work of literature into Japanese; so I want to use Japanese in the play in ways that are meaningful and effective, both for audiences who understand Japanese, and those who don’t. Since I’m not a native Japanese speaker, I’m working with the Japanese-born artist Yoriko Gillard as translator/adapter to help me make meaningful linguistic choices when writing in Japanese; we’ve also had input from other Japanese-speaking artists and hope to continue gaining more of these perspectives as we continue to develop the script.
What are you working on next?
Yoriko and I received a grant to do some artistic research into Japanese-language poetry written in Canadian internment camps, which is both fascinating in its own right and helping to develop the bilingual writing process for Anne’s Cradle. I expect (and hope!) for development for both The New Canadians and Anne’s Cradle to continue for years to come. That being said, I have an idea in the back of my mind for a smaller play, a four-hander about whiteness and gender, that I’m waiting for the right opportunity to start writing and pitching. It’s inspired by my experiences as a mixed-race woman with white family members, mapped onto a story about some public figures from the twentieth century, but with enough fictional elements that it’ll become its own story.
Do you have any favourite Canadian plays and/or which artists are currently inspiring you?
One of the big conversations that I feel hungry for is the place of Western society — and the people living in it — in relation to people living in other parts of the world. Jovanni Sy and Leanna Brodie’s Salesman in China is a huge inspiration here, as is Christine Quintana’s Clean/Espejos and Marcia Johnson’s Serving Elizabeth. My favourite feeling to have when leaving the theatre is when my brain is buzzing with questions and ideas about the world that I hadn’t considered before. Anything that does that for me is something I aspire to.
Keep up with Carolyn on her website, http://cynakagawa.com/, where you will also find a video preview of The New Canadians.
IG: cy_nakagawa
Disclaimer: Playwrights Guild of Canada (“PGC”) is a national arts service mandated to engage and grow an active Canadian writing community. We promote Canadian plays around the world to advance the creative rights and interests of professional Canadian playwrights for the stage. The views of our members are their own. The opinions of PGC as an association remain neutral.
