Barbed Wire
Multicultural Arts Center, 41 Second Street, Cambridge, MA
January 15–17, 2027, 8pm (Fri + Sat) and 2pm (Sun). Each year we celebrate MLK – the person and the weekend – with a performance focused on the legacy of Black America from Civil Rights to today. This year we bring to the stage Barbed Wire , a new work presented in full for the first time on our stage. Barbed Wire , a new full-length play by Japanese American playwright Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro and African American playwright Mary E. McCullough, reclaims this largely untold chapter of Asian, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) history by centering Sam, a young Japanese American inmate, and the unlikely cross-racial friendship he forges with Johnny, a Black soldier stationed at his camp. The play draws directly from Alfaro’s family experience (her father worked as a Japanese professor during WWII, and she witnessed the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war), which grounds the work in intergenerational memory and embodied narrative. Barbed Wire traces Sam’s journey from internment through his early college years, exploring what it means to build identity and claim belonging when one’s own country has deemed one the enemy. Venue Information: The…