When I was 16, I spent a month in Germany as a foreign exchange student. My 18-year-old host student and I took a train trip to Dachau, a World War II concentration camp. After touring the gas chambers and looking at enlarged photos of piles of shoes, hair and eyeglasses, we watched a short documentary film about what had happened there. I'll never forget how stricken my exchange partner looked as he absorbed the full horror of what his own people had done. He'd never been taught the full magnitude of it in school.

And then the realization sank in: My American education did the same thing to me. It wasn't until 8th grade that I read a single paragraph in a textbook acknowledging that the U.S. had rounded up Japanese-American citizens in the 1940s and put them in internment camps like Topaz, near Delta, Utah.

I guess no one likes to dwell on painful stories, whether they were the villains or the victims in the tale. Bryan Kido's family doesn't seem want to. The 25-year-old Japanese-American actor has been cast in Plan-B's upcoming production of "Block 8."

The two-person play -- a world-premiere by Plan-B's resident playwright, Matthew Ivan Bennett -- is the story of a young Japanese man housed in Block 8 of the Topaz camp who forms a friendship with a Caucasian librarian who works there.

Japanese internment is deeply rooted in Kido's family. As he sits in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner, he rattles off a long list of the relatives who were affected. One grandfather worked as a translator for the army, and the other was interned in Minidoka, Idaho. His grandmother was forced to move inland from Oregon. One of his great-uncles was interned at Topaz, and two others fought in the 442nd Infantry, a unit made up mostly of Japanese Americans who fought in Europe.

Kido's co-star, Anita Booher, turns to him in surprise. "Did you know all this before we started rehearsing?" she asks.

"I knew a little bit about it. It's something my family never really brings up," Kido replies. "I haven't had a whole lot of conversations with them about it until now. They would sometimes mention it but wouldn't go into details. I can't really imagine the prejudice that people in my family from that generation had to endure. That type of pain."

Plan-B's producing director, Jerry Rapier, says that the actors' connections to the story add an extra layer of meaning: "It's an intersection of art and life that is something very few people get to experience."

Booher has her own connection with her character: She works in real life as a high school librarian. "There are students that you take a particular liking to, and maternal instincts in you sometimes come out with certain students who seem to be struggling with issues," she says.

"Anita was kind of in the back of Matt's mind when he wrote the play," says Rapier, "and since the first draft, she's who I had hoped would be the right fit."

It's a personal story for Rapier, too. His natural mother is Japanese. She was outside in Nagasaki when the bomb fell, and later married a Caucasian soldier and moved to the U.S. in the 1950s. Rapier says that he's been waiting his entire career to develop a piece about Topaz. When he first approached Bennett to write the script, Rapier had intended to produce it in a later season, but he decided to move it up because it seemed topical.

"Issues of race are really at the forefront of people's minds with Barack Obama running for president," he told me in an interview last September. "Since 9/11, racial profiling and actions based on people's ethnicity are commonplace. The filter seems to be disappearing again about what's acceptable as far as racism goes."

Booher says she thinks Bennett has included some subtle references in "Block 8" to the recent profiling of Arab Americans, pointing out that her character says, "They hate us, our way of life, and will kill themselves to kill us," and, "They flew planes into--" without finishing the sentence. "I think Matt's subtly thrown some things in there, like 'Could it happen again? After 9/11, could I have reacted the same way?' " she says.

Booher says that her character, Ada, comes to recognize her own prejudice through her interaction with Kido's character, Ken. "She's racist but doesn't realize she is," says Booher. "It's just what she's been taught, what she's always heard. I think through her relationship with Ken, she starts to see it bounce off of him back at her, and think, 'Oh my goodness, I am racist. I have to question these things I've always believed to be true.' "

In the play, Ada's son is fighting overseas, and Ken becomes a sort of surrogate son for her as he struggles with the question of whether to enlist in the 442nd and prove his loyalty to the country that had stripped away his freedoms and imprisoned him.

"I hope the audience not only learns something, but feels something as they see these two people," Booher says. "The relationship between these two people, I think, is so beautiful. In their darkest times, somehow they're able to give comfort to each other in some small way."

This is not the first time Kido has played an internee at Topaz. He was a stand-in for the main character in the 2007 movie "American Pastime" about a kid who was interned at Topaz with his family and put together a baseball team.

This is however, the first professional theater role for Kido, who graduated from U of U's actor training program last May. He says he's been curious about playing a character in a theatrical production that's right for his ethnicity.

To prepare for their roles, Kido and Booher took a trip to Topaz with Rapier in September, and they found that it has shaped their performances. "Just to stand there and see that, the way [Ken] describes it," Booher says. " 'The mountains looked like corpses of lizards.' I think about that every night on stage. You just cannot get those images out of your head."

She also felt the sense of isolation after passing through the small town of Delta and continuing on into nothingness. "I kept trying to think as Ada when we were driving up there," she says. "What would Ada be thinking? 'Oh my gosh. Where am I going? There is nothing. I'm so cut off from everything I know and everyone I care about.' "

"It was unusual standing out there," Kido says. "It was very quiet. There was this solemn silence. There was this energy of pain."

Kido says he hopes the play will help the audience members think more about what happened at Topaz. He also recognizes that there are some people who already realize all too well.

"It's going to definitely stir up some heavy emotions for a lot of people," he says. "My grandfather on my mom's side probably won't see it. Every time my mom tried to talk to him about it, he was just very hesitant."

Kido's parents, though, will definitely be there. "Straight up, they think it's important, for all Japanese-Americans and for our family," he says.

Booher says she doesn't think today's students are taught the full magnitude of what occurred at camps like Topaz. "There's so much information to be conveyed in schools these days that it just kind of gets brushed by," she says.

"Block 8," she says, brings out the emotion: "It makes it personal."