"It just flabbergasted me that I didn't know. At the same time, the story itself delighted me," Sakata says.

Three Japanese-Americans took their fight against internment all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1940s. But most people, if they know about the court cases at all, know about Korematsu v. United States. (The podcast More Perfect provides an excellent history of that story here.)

Sakata considered writing a play about all three: Korematsu, Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasuri. But the longtime actress had never written a play before, and that challenge seemed too daunting. "It was just a little too much to handle. So I thought I would just focus on telling this one story that I loved so much, and that I never saw in my history books," she says.

Part of what intrigued Sakata was Hirabayashi's Quaker faith. "I had grown up in a Japanese-American Presbyterian family, and that's something I never heard of: a second generation Japanese-American Quaker." Hirabayashi converted in college, but as Sakata learned, it wasn't a big stretch, given that his parents were members of a Japanese Christian sect called Mukyōkaishugi, known for its socially progressive values similar to those of the Quakers.

Perhaps it took a man given to iconoclasm to pick a fight with the federal government. He had already joined the Quaker-run American Friends Service Committee by that point, as the group was helping Japanese-Americans thrown into disarray by Executive Order 9066. Later, the ACLU would help him in court.

Like Korematsu and Yasui, Hirabayashi lost before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was legally vindicated in the 1980s, though. Hirabayashi's convictions on both charges were overturned by the U.S. District Court in Seattle and the federal appeals curt, because evidence arose that the Solicitor General's office cited examples of Japanese-American sabotage in its Supreme Court arguments, despite having determined the rumored incidents were indeed rumors only.

Hirabayashi died in 2012 and received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.

A Showcase for An Asian-American Actor

Hold These Truths provides plenty of opportunity to stretch for Joel de la Fuente, perhaps best known for his role as Inspector Kido in Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. He gets to play more than 35 characters, switching between them with impressively deft rapidity, sometimes mid-sentence.

Sakata says, "I really wanted one Asian-American actor to have a chance to show his virtuosity. You see him do one role on High Castle, but in this play, you get to see him play an amazing array." In a way, the role is a vindication for Sakata, too, she says, having suffered as an actress from the paucity of complex roles written for Asian-Americans during her own career.

Watch de la Fuente perform a conversation between Gordon Hirabayashi and his mother in Hold These Truths.

Hold These Truths made its world premiere in 2007 in Los Angeles with East West Players, the nation’s oldest Asian-American theater company.

Sakata says she originally wrote the play to preserve and celebrate the history, even though now it sounds like it was ripped from today’s news headlines. "We are in a time right now politically where we need some beam of light, some hope, and I hope that the story will provide that, will inspire us to stand for what's right even when times are going against us."

Lisa Rothe, who's been directing this play since 2009, agrees that audience reaction has changed markedly over the years the play has traveled the country. Rothe says, "Before the election [of President Donald Trump], the conversation was on a shelf. Like, 'Aren't we happy that we've moved beyond this?' Now, to actually see it on the front pages of the newspaper is pretty extraordinary, and depressing.

Even if you don’t agree with the politics of the play, it is a rip-roaring ride through a dramatic chapter in American history, and a reminder that the civil liberties promised in this nation's founding documents are still the subject of continuous debate and conflict.