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Critic’s Notebook

When Disenfranchised Lives and American Ideals Collide Onstage

From left: Manny Ureña, Camilo Almonacid and Zuleyma Guevara in “De Novo,” a documentary theater piece based on an actual deportation case.Credit...Russ Rowland

“You came out to see a show,” Karma Mayet tells the audience at the top of “Race Card,” a provocative, not-quite-solo performance that is part storytelling, part game of bid whist. “I don’t know if you realize you’re in it.”

We’re in it not only because the stories Ms. Mayet tells are determined by cards that the spectators play, detaching them from our seat backs and calling them out to her (four people at a time, high card wins). But we’re also in it because those stories — anecdotes drawn from her own life, about the indignities and affronts that come with being black in the United States — will resonate with or implicate us.

Either way, if we are her fellow Americans, we are part of the society she describes. Either way, we have a stake in the ugliness she outlines, and thus in the show.

That’s true not only of “Race Card” (which ended its limited run on Saturday at Jack, in Brooklyn) but also of two other powerful pieces of political theater on New York stages — small productions that quietly collide American ideals with the experiences of real people marked as other in this country.

In Jeanne Sakata’s “Hold These Truths,” through Dec. 20 at the Sheen Center, the hero is Gordon Hirabayashi, a Japanese-American who as a young man during World War II refuses to go along when the government orders him into an internment camp. In Jeffrey Solomon’s “De Novo,” through Dec. 22 as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door series, the victim is a teenager named Edgar Chocoy-Guzman, caught in a deportation system that doesn’t grasp the mortal danger that awaits him if he is sent back to his native Guatemala.

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Joel de la Fuente portrays Gordon Hirabayashi, who protested the internment of Japanese-Americans, in Jeanne Sakata’s “Hold These Truths.”Credit...Lia Chang

“Hold These Truths,” elegantly directed by Lisa Rothe in a top-notch production for the company Hang a Tale, is a gripping story about a shameful chapter of our history, when the United States government looked at its own people and saw the enemy. It is also the gentlest of these three shows. That’s partly because its action (aided by all-around excellent design: set by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams, lighting by Cat Tate Starmer, music and sound by Daniel Kluger) takes place at the greatest historical remove.

It’s also because of Joel de la Fuente’s endearing solo performance, which vividly — and, more often than you’d think, comically — renders Gordon and the constellation of people around him. Ms. Sakata’s deeply researched script could come off as preachy, but in Mr. de la Fuente’s hands, Gordon is a sweetly steely idealist. The eldest son of immigrants in Washington State, he is an enthusiastic American. When his mother frets about the possibility of reprisals if war with Japan breaks out, Gordon promises he won’t let anything happen to her.

“The Constitution protects us, ’cause we’re American citizens,” he says.

He is, of course, badly mistaken about that. Like almost everyone else of Japanese heritage living on the West Coast, his family members are packed off to an internment camp, forced to sell their belongings fire-sale cheap before they go. Gordon refuses to comply and fights the order as far as the Supreme Court.

Bigotry is nothing new to him, though. Before the war, as a college student, Gordon takes a trip to New York, where for the first time he experiences being able to go where he pleases without considering whether he’ll be barred entry because of his race.

“Back home in Seattle,” he says, “I always have to think ahead if I go out with the fellas, or if I take a gal on a date: I can go here, I can’t go there, I’ll get turned out of the Miramar, better avoid Pacific Street.” Suddenly he is free to just be a person.

Not for long. When the government, newly at war, announces a curfew for anyone of Japanese descent, the order immediately sets him apart from friends and classmates, even foreigners from countries other than Japan. “It’s embarrassing,” Gordon says simply, and in those two words is a world of undeserved humiliation.

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Mr. Ureña as a Guatemalan immigrant faced with deportation in “De Novo.”Credit...Russ Rowland

Citizenship isn’t even an illusory protection in “De Novo,” deftly directed by Mr. Solomon for Houses on the Moon Theater Company. Edgar (Manny Ureña), brought to the United States by a coyote at 14, isn’t an American, and neither is his mother (Zuleyma Guevara), who left him behind as a baby when she came to this country to make a living.

“We are about to construct for you a documentary theater piece about the ‘undocumented,’ which will be created entirely from actual documents,” one of the actors says as the show starts. Those documents — including court transcripts, interviews and letters — make compelling dialogue, rendered tenderly human by a cast that includes Emily Joy Weiner and Camilo Almonacid.

As a program note spells out, “de novo” refers both to starting over and to a retrial that includes new evidence. The play reargues Edgar’s deportation case, and in its tragedy demands that we consider who’s allowed to make a home in this country free of intimidation, and who we as a society are willing to fight for rather than against.

Where “De Novo” is mournful, “Race Card” is furious. Laying out rules that got snaps of approval from some audience members the night I saw the show, Ms. Mayet explains that white people are not invited to come up to her after the performance to tell her about their experience of it and that she will not be explaining her cultural references. She’s invoking black privilege, she says, which is fair enough.

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In “Race Card,” Karma Mayet invites the audience to play bid whist as a way to talk about discrimination.Credit...Jack

“Race Card” isn’t neat like “De Novo” and “Hold These Truths,” and it isn’t meant to be. There’s no researcher’s distance between Ms. Mayet and the stories from her life, some of which are ambiguous, at least in the details she includes. But that’s the thing about bigotry: Some of it flies beneath the radar because it can’t be clearly proved.

The more tales Ms. Mayet tells, the more we get a sense of her personal history — how it felt to move at 8 to a small, almost entirely white Illinois town, where a little boy told her to go back to Africa (she stood up for herself; they became friends), and where the children on her first day of school whispered a racial slur about her. (“They’ve been trained,” she says.)

There’s also her cultural history, and that’s why we’re playing bid whist. Popular with many black Americans these days, it was also a favorite in the days of Pullman porters, who played it on long train rides, working a job that was among the only options open to them.

The nation’s wounds are old and deep, “Race Card” makes plain, and Americans are still carrying the scars.

Race Card
Ended Dec. 16 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org.

Hold These Truths
Through Dec. 20 at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, Manhattan; sheencenter.org.

De Novo
Through Dec. 22 at Next Door at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: My Fellow American, My Enemy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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