Review: 'Block 8' strains to portray Topaz from inside and out

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In a scene from Matthew Ivan Bennett's "Block 8," a drama about Topaz, the Japanese internment camp in Utah's west desert during World War II, Ken tries to teach Ada to meditate. "Let yourself be breathed in like the desert," he tells her. "We're all gold lost in the silt of the river; meditation is a way to screen out the silt."

But meditation makes Ada feel uncomfortable. It is as alien to her as the bleak, sterile environment of the camp is to Ken and his family, who have been uprooted and brought there from their home in San Francisco.

This moment from Plan-B Theatre Company's world premiere production of "Block 8" vividly illustrates the differences between the two characters and the reason why they will never truly understand each other: Ken is Japanese, Eastern, contemplative, young; he wants to learn to let go so he can move on with his life. Ada, the Utah schoolteacher and librarian he has befriended, is American, Western, analytical, a mother; her experience has taught her to confront life head on.

In many ways, "Block 8" is more like a series of meditations than a play, and that structure paradoxically is the source of its strength and its weakness. The two characters share with us their reflections of life in the camp and America during that tumultuous time period, which function almost like extracts from a diary.

The play is beautifully written, poetic at times, and we learn a lot about the two characters from the way they interpret what's going on around them, but there's little dramatic action.

"Block 8" is at its best when the two interact; in these scenes, Bennett finds ways to make history real and involve us directly in Ken and Ada's lives. But "Block 8" is ultimately limited in its dramatic effect by what it wants to do: both to commemorate and to inform us about a shameful chapter in America's and Utah's past.

Plan-B's production makes the most of the play's static shortcomings. Director Jerry Rapier moves the two characters around, often creating striking stage pictures, and extracts what dramatic intensity he can from their scenes together.

Both Bryan Kido and Anita Booher demonstrate comprehensive command of their characters. Kido's composed, self-contained Ken handles his altered circumstances with a combination of wry humor, philosophical speculation, frustration and righteous anger. Booher's Ada deftly balances compassion for Ken's situation against her conviction that her country is doing the best it can in wartime. She's struggling with her own demons, her anxiety and uncertainty about her son fighting in the Pacific, while clinging to the desperate hope that he and America will emerge intact.

The crosshatched design of Randy Rasmussen's set suggests barbed wire, but when backlit during the play, it resembles a Japanese house, simultaneously contrasting two images from the internees' lives. Jesse Portillo's expressive lighting delineates scenes and shifts flexibly to focus attention. Cheryl Ann Cluff's sound design, with its constant wind and snatches of radio broadcasts, and Phillip Lowe's period costumes carry us firmly back to the 1940s.

Although "Block 8" is not always dramatically compelling, it gives us a strong sense of what life was like at Topaz and captures the different ways people viewed it at the time.