
Media Contact: Javier Rojas, javier.rojas@csun.edu, (818) 677-2130
A new opera by California State University, Northridge emeritus music professor Daniel Kessner is shining light on the lives of members of a Japanese American family and their friends while imprisoned in a US internment camp during World War II.
“The Camp: An Opera in Two Acts,” which tells the story of the Shimono family, will open on Saturday, Feb 22, and run through Sunday, March 2.
The production centers around the Shimono family, Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their suburban home in Southern California. After Mas, a fisherman and the head of the household, is arrested by the FBI on suspicion of espionage, the family is reunited in a desolate incarceration camp. As the family struggles to survive the emotional and physical toll of their wrongful imprisonment, this poignant, new opera illuminates the remarkable strength of familial bonds and the power of collective resistance in the face of injustice.
This is a story that Kessner, who taught music composition and theory at CSUN from 1970 through 2006, has been wanting to tell for years.
“I grew up around lots of minority communities, particularly Asian Americans, and most of my friends in junior high and high school were either Japanese or Filipino,” Kessner said. “This was in the early ‘60s after World War II. Only later, I found out that their parents and older siblings spent time in internment camps during the war.
“This is something nobody really talked about,” Kessner continued. “But as they grew older, my friends started probing their parents and grandparents and, little by little, the story about the camps started to come out and I knew this was a story that needed to be told.”
Kessner wrote the opera five years ago and will be joined in the production by several CSUN alumni, including Anne Marie Ketchum De La Vega as artistic consultant, Roberto Gomez as co-lead singer, and Steven Hofer as music director, as well as a combination of production team members, singers and orchestra members.
The hope, Kessner said, is that attendees will walk away from the show with a new perspective on what life was like in the internment camps.
“I want the public to enjoy the opera as an opera, as a musical and a theatrical work of art,” Kessner said. “But I also want them to come away with some more knowledge of what it must have been like to be in the camps and hear the stories of those who went through these experiences.”
The production will take place at the JACCC Aratani Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, on Saturday, Feb. 22, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Feb. 23, 2:30 p.m.; Saturday, March 1, 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, March 2, 2:30 p.m.
Tickets start at $22. To buy tickets, visit the website jaccc.org/events/the-camp-an-opera-in-two-acts.