As ugly, protracted conflicts inflame multiple regions of our world, with consequences penetrating even our Canadian cocoon, Stratford Festival’s deeply affecting adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s memoir Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents arrives with perfect timing. The book won CBC’s Canada Reads competition in 2018 for its powerful account of two family histories scarred by World War II. His maternal grandmother Mitsue Sakamoto was forcibly relocated and interned with her family by the Canadian government after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and his paternal grandfather Ralph MacLean spent years in Japanese POW camps after being captured in Hong Kong. The bestselling memoir has been acclaimed for its intimate portrayal of how these two people — who had both suffered deeply and had every reason to carry hatred forward — instead chose forgiveness, and eventually became family when Mitsue’s daughter and Ralph’s son married.
A caveat before I say more: I have not read the memoir, so in my trip to the Tom Patterson Theatre, I processed Forgiveness purely as a theatrical experience, not as the adaptation of a pre-existing prose narrative. And from that perspective, I find that playwright Hiro Kanagawa and director Stafford Arima have together fashioned a dramatic experience that is visually compelling and narratively urgent … yet ultimately mysterious. The production forces us to confront how easily society can strip away human dignity, and challenges us with an alternative to endless cycles of hatred ….yet leaves us no simple way to understand the bridge between the two. Instead, it requires us to build it for ourselves.
The story weaves together the harrowing World War II narratives of Mitsue (Yoshie Bancroft) and Ralph (Jeff Lillico), who first appear on the Tom Patterson theatre’s thrust stage amid sundry suitcases and other residue of their difficult lives, and begin immediately by breaking the fourth wall. They acknowledge the difficulty but necessity – for them and for us – of the journey of memory that lies ahead. They have arrived united at their end point, but now it’s our turn to participate in their separate journeys to get here. “We’ll get through this together,” says Ralph, reinforcing the challenge and establishing an intimacy with us and with Mitsue, with whom he will share the stage throughout the show … but whom in story time, he will not meet for the first time until decades after the war.
What follows is a masterclass in parallel storytelling that concretizes the characters’ two simultaneous journeys into hell. The framing story takes place in the 1960s, as Mitsue and her family prepare nervously for a dinner party visit from Ralph and his family – and the narrative moves backwards and forwards from Mitsue and Ralph’s young adulthoods, through the time of the war, to after the war and finally, to this time when they will first meet. The non-linear approach challenges oversimplified cause-and-effect thinking, and allows the two stories to comment on one another. As the storm clouds of World War 2 gather, we track how Ralph turns from high-school youth into eager soldier, then prisoner of war. At the same moments, we see Mitsue turn from high-school youth into ambitious budding career woman, then prisoner of the Canadian government.
The scenes are short, sharp and vivid – and the fluidity of the transitions and their emotional resonance is the result of Stephanie Graham’s skilled choreography, supported and amplified by Kaileigh Krysztofiak’s lighting design and Olivia Wheeler’s sound design. For instance, we watch young Ralph MacLean and his friends play hockey in their Toronto Maple Leaf jerseys – while inhaling and thoughtlessly spewing the kind of casual prejudices that Mitsue and her friends and family are on the receiving end of in their story. Predating the war, these prejudices underpin and ultimately enable the Japanese-Canadian internment — showing us how systemic cruelty and racism begin in seemingly innocent moments. The combination of split-screen scenes powered by compelling lighting, sound and choreography culminate in an Act One finale that shows us Mitsue and Ralph’s dual descents into imprisonment, with extraordinary power and theatricality.
Compelling performances ground this complex back-and-forth of temporal and perspective shifts. Bancroft and Lillico deliver performances that span decades while maintaining emotional continuity, though both are also routinely required to explicate the plot through direct address – a compromise necessary to enable us to manage the time jumps. Lillico’s 1960s Ralph is a volatile and haunted presence, and the various Ralphs whom we see in all of these brief scenes track his heartbreaking journey. Meanwhile, Bancroft’s Mitsue personifies a strength fused from dignity, outrage and resilience: the genius of her performance is how it maps almost imperceptible, yet critical shifts in the way she deploys that strength. And the ensemble work in support of their journeys is excellent. Hiro Kanagawa disappears into key roles on both sides of the narrative divide: as Mitsue’s aging father Yosuke and Ralph’s sadistic torturer Kato, while Michael Man’s endearing portrayal of Mitsue’s husband Hideo Sakamoto bridges the generational divide with delicate precision.
Act Two plunges us deeper into parallel hells: Mitsue’s family, stripped of possessions and rights, scrape for existence in an internment camp, then on an Alberta farm — while Ralph endures disease, privation and physical and psychological torture in Japanese POW camps. And as we ricochet between the indignities of these parallel nightmares, any attempt to measure or compare their suffering becomes impossible. Each story’s horror intensifies and feels more intense and awful … until our perspective shifts to the other. This refusal to create a hierarchy of suffering is part of what is remarkable about Forgiveness. It never reduces its complex historical material to simple lessons, and most interesting of all, it never shows us the exact moment when – or the mechanism through which – forgiveness becomes possible. Ralph and Mitsue never explicitly verbalize or narrativize their decisions to choose reconciliation. Instead, we watch the buildup of suffering and intractable obstacles across decades … until we arrive at a final scene that demonstrates the power of their choice of reconciliation over hatred.
In his Director’s Notes, Arima suggests that Forgiveness offers “the world something it desperately needs right now – a path forward, not through vengeance, but through virtue.” Yet what makes this production so powerful is its ultimate resistance to explaining the alchemy of forgiveness. Forgiveness, the show seems to argue, happens at a cellular level – as an incremental, inscrutable and almost invisible realization that it is the only way forward. We can bear witness to it externally – but to understand it, let alone embrace it, requires us to undertake difficult work.
By refusing to package forgiveness as a neat solution, while simultaneously showing its necessity, Forgiveness forces us to confront an uncomfortable but essential paradox in this time of conflict. Forgiveness and reconciliation may be impossible to fully achieve, and there is no magical formula or simple explanation for how to achieve it – yet pursuing it remains our only viable path forward.
Forgiveness is on stage at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre until September 27, 2025. Tickets are available on stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
