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The Philip Kan Gotanda Chronicles

He captured early-20th-century Hawai‘i with his bittersweet tale of thwarted love in Ballad of Yachiyo. He was the first playwright to ever dramatize life immediately after the release of some 120,000 Japanese Americans from internment camps in Sisters Matsumoto. He brought to life the tumultuous civil rights era of the late-1960s when ‘Orientals’ claimed their ‘Asian American’ identity in The Wind Cries Mary. And he illuminated the struggle for the positive portrayal of Asian Americans in the media in the 1980s hit Yankee Dawg You Die.

If August Wilson is deemed to be the voice of African America, then undoubtedly Philip Kan Gotanda is the chronicler of the Japanese American experience [see sidebar].

“If you look at the body of Philip’s work, you find an extraordinary range of subjects, mediums and aesthetic approaches,” says longtime friend and fellow playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly). “His theatrical voice is as versatile and wide-ranging as any in the world today; yet he’s consistently harnessed his talents to explore and discover Asian America.”

Over the last three decades, Gotanda has worked successfully in a myriad of mediums – from music to theater to film. He currently appears to be focusing his talents on the stage. With endless back-to-back projects, Gotanda continues his creative quest: “I’m interested in working with a breadth of selected forms so I can give myself as big a canvas as possible to work with.”

One of the focal points on that canvas is the critically acclaimed world premiere of a fist of roses – already in its closing weekend at San Francisco’s Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts. The taut, 70-minute fist is without a linear storyline. It was created in intense collaboration with actors, musicians, and a choreographer. The result is different for Gotanda, but it’s still a stunning mosaic of the incomprehensible stories behind male violence against women.

“It is truly extraordinary, humbling and awe-inspiring to see someone who has written for 25 years and more, who has been the hero for communities of people, [and] who has mastered the dramatic form,” says program director Sean San Jose. “After all this, to then decide he wants to try and reach for something new, something neither us nor he nor the audience has experienced yet, is astonishing.”

Next, Gotanda begins work on the Asian American Theater Company’s February debut of his Under the Rainbow. The first of the one-acts, Natalie Wood Is Dead, is a companion piece to Yankee Dawg You Die and focuses on two women, a mother and daughter rather than Dawg’s two men, and their experiences in the Hollywood acting scene.

“Under the Rainbow seems to be a piece that would connect to both the older and younger audiences,” says Sean Lim, AATC’s artistic director. “I found the vision of seeing the older mother tell her daughter to essentially ‘suck it up and act tough’ to be a great twist on the Asian American female.”

Rainbow’s second piece, White Manifesto, a monologue by a privileged white male who has a penchant for Asian women, is certain to get major reactions. “People may not agree with everything that is said, but it will give the Asian American community a chance to see what goes through the minds of some white men,” Lim says.

“It’s a little voyeuristic but very essential if we are to understand the discontents. Remember, it was a bunch of discontented white teenage males who committed that violent hate crime in the Sunset [neighborhood of San Francisco in June 2003] on the Asian American youths. … Racism has been reborn and reintroduced to our younger generation. We need to recognize that and start talking about it,” he says.

Two other of Gotanda’s works headed for world premieres, Manzanar: An American Story and After the War, are revisitations of the internment crisis. The former is a multimedia, multi-layered collaboration with renowned luminaries; the latter is a sprawling look at life for returning internees in San Francisco’s Japantown during the early 1950s. “His art illuminates areas of our national heritage that, for the general population, are often diminished, misunderstood or ignored,” says Stephanie Glass Solomon, Manzanar’s producer. “He shows the connection between human emotions and critical events and therefore is able to reveal our commonalities. This helps to make us whole as a society.”

After the War, which captures postwar life for 11 Americans of diverse backgrounds brought together by a shared address – that of a boarding house in Japantown – premieres next season at the American Conservatory Theatre, one of the country’s premier stages. Following the critical success of Gotanda’s Yohen that ran last fall at the ACT, Carey Perloff, its lauded artistic director, commissioned Gotanda to write a piece specifically for its core company of actors.

“It’s an enormous, epic play,” says Perloff, who directed a workshop of After at last year’s Sundance Theatre Lab. “It’s a major breakthrough for Philip. He has tended to write stories in miniature, so we’re thrilled that he’s made this leap and made it so wonderfully.”

Perloff’s associate artistic director Johanna Pfaelzer, who shepherded last season’s Yohen, describes After as a “microcosm of what’s going on in the world.” “What’s amazing about Japantown,” she says, “is the incredible confluence of diverse populations living together in a compressed area of a compressed city.” She adds of Gotanda’s works, “Philip’s characters feel things so deeply, but they are often at the mercy of their own inability to express those feelings — and that’s what creates such interesting dramatic tension.”

If you can’t experience that dramatic tension live, give thanks to the University of Washington Press for its latest collection of Gotanda plays, No More Cherry Blossoms: Sisters Matsumoto and Other Plays, which debuts early next spring. No More follows Gotanda’s 1995 collection, Fish Head Soup and Other Plays. In addition to Sisters, this latest collection includes the lyrical Ballad of Yachiyo, the historic The Wind Cries Mary, and the in-your-face Under the Rainbow.

“The unifying theme of these plays,” says the press’s executive editor, Michael Duckworth, “is that they all represent very strong Japanese women who not only break stereotypes but do so in a modern way. These women represent new types of modern living, new ways of thinking, of not being easily labeled or pigeonholed.” …[click here for more]

Author profile: “The Philip Kan Gotanda Chronicles,” AsianWeek, November 26, 2004

Tidbit: Click here to read my March 2007 cover story profile on our Mr. PKG in American Theatre magazine.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2005