In the opening of Aaron Asano Swenson’s new play KILO-WAT, Ken Kushida, a Japanese-American podcaster, sets the stage for telling the story about Wat ‘Kilo-Wat’ Misaka, a Utah native of Japanese descent who played point guard to lead the University of Utah basketball team to an NCAA championship in 1944 and the NIT championship in 1947. Ken’s podcast intro contextualizes the ideas of “lightning, legacy, and the things we carry.” He explains:
Lightning and luck have become inseparable. Think of the folk sayings: ”luck comes like a bolt from the blue.’ ‘Lightning never strikes the same place twice.’ They’re not just connected; connection defines them. Call it what you want—coincidence, conduction. Without connection, neither one would exist.
But in reality, lightning behaves in logical ways. And even if we can’t predict where it’s headed, we can learn a lot from where it’s been.
KILO-WAT is Plan-B Theatre’s first play that touches prominently on sports and in particular, an athlete — Misaka, in this case. While Swenson has made Misaka’s historical legacy as a basketball player a compelling entry point into the story, audience members will learn, within the space of less than an hour, that his legendary story is more deep-seated in its historical importance than just his success on the basketball court. Directed by Jerry Rapier, the play will be performed by Bryan Kido. It has a limited public performance run at Kingsbury Hall at the University of Utah, Feb. 14-16, in a co-production with Utah Presents’ Stage Door Series.
Swenson’s script is based on the broader conceptual approach of ‘history in person.’ KILO-WAT effectively frames Misaka’s life story in a manner that assures it should not lapse into obscurity, despite Misaka’s own modest brush-off of it as not that “big of a deal,” as he expressed during his lifetime. Channeling Misaka’s story through the perspective of a podcaster, Swenson reminds us of history as something that is, in part, made within and by individuals and the connecting value in studying persons as historically fashioned.
Comprehensively researched, the script is a finely crafted testament that, indeed, Misaka’s story is richer in detail than what might have been anticipated at the outset. It was an audacious task for Swenson in his first outing as a playwright (Swenson has taken on direct roles as performer and costume designer in more than two dozen Plan-B productions and has been designer and illustrator for seven seasons with the company). Speaking on behalf of himself as well as his partner (Nathan), Swenson wrote in a Plan-B blog, “We are not a basketball household.”
Within months, Swenson had perused and processed a substantial bounty of research materials about Misaka, who was well into his nineties when he died in 2019. There were oral histories recorded with the American West Center, archival images, web articles, press features, governmental documents and notes and materials about the Japanese community in Utah. Ahead of the play’s premiere, Plan-B Also offered a free, public screening of Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story, a documentary by filmmakers Christine and Bruce Johnson.
What emerged about Misaka, who was born in Ogden in 1923, and his story as ‘history in person’ raised the complexity of stakes for Swenson in making a historically resilient and enlightened portrait of the man. Also, that portrait would need to command its audiences to acknowledge that not only Misaka’s story is being told in the sunlight of historical durability but also the embodying history of his time is illuminated just as brightly. The same creative brief propelled Plan-B Theatre’s 2023 production of Jenifer Nii’s Fire!, about the life of the Utah-born Wallace Thurman, who became a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. It is more than coincidental to note that in Utah, there is nothing named to honor the legacy of either man, reminding us that Utah’s history has always been much more than its predominantly cited familiar details, figures and events.
With Ken as podcaster, the audience learns many details about Misaka. While many know of more recent pro Asian-American basketball players such as Yao Ming, Jeremy Lin and Rui Hachimura, Misaka was the first to break the color barrier and play in the NBA (then the New York Knickerbockers) and was invited to join the Harlem Globetrotters.
But, Misaka’s recognition as basketball’s unlikely hero also occurred amidst more historically consequential events. He was drafted twice: his first time in duty sent him to Japan as an intelligence officer and translator. After the war ended, he interviewed survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. The irony of history runs deep in his story.
Working trial and error, Swenson considered different approaches for synthesizing, compounding and compacting the wealth of material he encountered. Ironically, as he explained in his blog, “In the end, it was that trivia helped me find my way—not surprising, since trivia may be one of the few places where the interests of ’sports people’ and ‘theatre people’ overlap.”
Making that connection, Swenson turned to his own family story and how his grandparents met, along with their own experiences of the wartime Japanese incarceration camps and forced relocation of Japanese Americans. The tangible concrete accounts and evidence of what those experiences were like for his grandparents no longer exist for Swenson, even to confirm whether or not they had heard about Misaka as a college basketball star.
Discovering ‘history in person,’ Swenson ultimately found his connection with Misaka and his reconnection with his grandparents. As Ken says in the play, “All tales start the same way. They all arrive at the same destination. Between them, the tale follows its own path. But a legend is not a myth. ‘Japanese’ and ‘Japanese American’ aren’t the same. World War II wasn’t ‘long, long ago,’ and it won’t be for a long, long time.”
Public performances will take place Feb. 14 and Feb.15 at 7:30 p.m. and meatiness on Feb. 15 at 4 p.m. and Feb. 16 at 2 p.m. For more details and tickets, click on the Plan-B website page.
The play also will offer four free student previews Feb. 11-13, for students in grades 7-12, and a free high school tour Feb. 18-21, to Davinci Academy in Ogden, City Academy in Salt Lake City, and Utah Arts Academy in St. George, all part of Plan-B’s A Week With A Play program.