Baseball brings joy behind barbed wire in L.A. Theatre Works
audio theater recording of ‘Zeni: Dean of the Diamond’
LOS ANGELES (January 14, 2025) — “We took a piece of barren land and turned it into a place of hope, a piece of freedom, where everyone could find joy again.” Fresno baseball legend Kenichi Zenimura broke records and barriers, building a baseball field and organizing a league behind the barbed wire fence of a Japanese internment camp during World War II. L.A. Theatre Works presents a state-of-the-art audio theater recording of Zeni: Dean of the Diamond, a new play by Mas Moriya based on the true-life story of the man often referred to as “the father of Japanese American baseball.”
Zenimura, known as “Zeni,” loved baseball. As a young man in the 1920s he developed a Nisei baseball league in Fresno, California, going on to organize barnstorming tours that brought the likes of Babe Ruth to the West Coast and Japan. When he and his family were sent to Gila River, an internment camp in Arizona where Japanese Americans were incarcerated, he knew that, somehow, baseball would be the key to improving the lives of his fellow detainees.
”This is an amazing story about how a group of men and boys were able to create a sense of community and home in an unthinkably inhospitable environment,” says L.A. Theatre Works senior producer Anna Lyse Erikson, who directed the recording.
Part of LATW’s “Japanese American Civil Liberties” podcast series, a new collection of audio theater productions about the Japanese American experience during and after World War II, Zeni: Dean of the Diamond stars Keiko Agena, Tristan Chung, CJ Cruz, Genki Hall, Derrick Kemp, Michael Sun Lee, John Miyasaki, Rob Nagle, Rosie Narasaki, Tristan Pravong, Thomas Winter and Paul Yen. The series is sponsored by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library.
L.A. Theatre Works, the world’s foremost producer of audio theater, stands apart in its approach to making great theater widely accessible and affordable, bringing recordings of plays into homes and classrooms of millions of theater lovers, teachers and students each year. The company’s catalog of nearly 600 recorded plays is the largest archive of its kind in the world. LATW’s syndicated audio theater series broadcasts weekly on public radio stations across the U.S. (locally, in Southern California, on KPFK 90.7 FM); can be downloaded wherever you get your podcasts; and can be streamed on demand at latw.org. AudioFile magazine calls L.A. Theatre Works productions “the gold standard for fine audio theater recordings.”
Zeni: Dean of the Diamond is available now at streaming.latw.org and at retailers and libraries everywhere.
PASADENA, Calif (January 7, 2025) –– Delve deep into the psychological turmoil of a man fighting from a place of loss and tortured by guilt, fate and the corrupting influence of his own desires when Andi Chapman directs William Shakespeare‘s final and darkest tragedy. Presented by acclaimed classical theater company A Noise Within, Macbeth runs February 15 through March 9 at the company’s home in Pasadena. Low-priced previews begin February 9.
