A couple separates after more than 25 years of marriage but the wife continues to do the husband’s laundry every week. A retired doctor reminisces about his immigrant past while demonstrating the finicky art of carp fishing. Two Hollywood actors, one a cynical veteran and the other an idealistic young novice, square off in a tense intergenerational feud.
These people all have at least two things in common: they’re Japanese-Americans, and they inhabit the distinctive plays of Philip Kan Gotanda. Gotanda’s dramas explore many aspects of the Japanese- American experience in a voice that is by turns wry, angry, satirical and lyrical, but always accessible.
“I try to make my work culturally specific and universal at the same time,” suggests the San Francisco-based writer. “I’ve always felt that the more you explore the differences between people, the more universal a play becomes. Madeline Puzo, who produced two Gotanda scripts in the Mark Taper Forum’s New Theatre for Now series in Los Angeles, agrees. “Phil’s work doesn’t speak solely to Asian Americans,” she confirms. “The experiences he records are so human and deeply personal that they speak to all of us—as all good plays do.”
This is turning into a banner year for Gotanda, whose latest play, Yankee Dawg You Die, had successful runs at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Los Angeles Theatre Center and opens in new productions at Seattle’s Group Theatre Company on Sept. 15 and Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge Theatre on Sept. 23. The film version of Gotanda’s domestic drama The Wash (produced by American Playhouse and Lumiere Productions) is slated for release this month. Gotanda also found time to stage a spring revival of his 1980 play Song for a Nisei Fisherman at San Francisco’s Asian American Theatre Company (AATC), and he spent part of the summer refining a new piece, Fish Head Soup, at the Sundance Playwrights Institute in Utah. He’ll round out the year by directing Inscrutable Grin, an independent feature film about a struggling Asian-American theatre troupe.
Gotanda has plenty of raw material for the latter project, most of it gathered firsthand. A key participant in the vigorous Asian-American theatre movement during the late 1970s and into the 1980s, he developed his writing skills at AATC and at East West Players in Los Angeles. Like his Tony-winning friend and fellow playwright David Henry Hwang, Gotanda is now reaching a larger, more “mainstream” audience in theatres around the country. But he plans to continue exploring the subject matter closest to his heart: the social. cultural and personal reality of contemporary Jap-anese-Americans.
The 38-year-old Gotanda doesn’t mind being categorized as an Asian-American artist—in fact, he welcomes it. “Some writers feel that any kind of label is limiting but I’m actually just the opposite,” he declares with customary exuberance. “I look at it as a kind of freedom. It’s only limiting if someone doesn’t understand that people of color can be Americans, that we’re not quirky or exotic or a fad that’s going to disappear. The world of Asian America is complex, with all sorts of issues and conflicts that we have among ourselves, as well as with the larger society.”
Many of the conflicts Gotanda addresses in his plays spring directly from his own Sansei (third-generation American) background. Raised in a tight-knit, middle-class Japanese-American community in Stockton, Calif., Gotanda became vividly aware as a teenager that his parents—and most other Japanese-American citizens—were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. That traumatic event left what he calls an “indelible psychic scar” on his elders, and had a profound politicizing effect on many members of his own generation.
“You put 120,000 people in prison, lock them up for four years, and it’s going to influence their mass psychology,” he says. “Anytime I dip into the psyche of any Japanese-American character, I find the camps and the issue of racism there. Whether you deal with it explicitly or implicitly or don’t talk about it at all, it’s always there.”
Gotanda has never focused directly on the internment era, but uses it as a strong psychological subtext, especially for his older characters. Song for a Nisei Fisherman is an attempt to confront the cultural contradictions of his father’s life: “It’s about a man who, like my father, comes from Hawaii with an ‘I can do it’ attitude and puts himself through medical school. The American dream seems to work for him—until he reaches the camps. After that point he’s never the same. He feels betrayed, and gets very confused about how he’s supposed to negotiate the world.”
That theme of cultural confusion and betrayed expectations turns up again in The Wash, Gotanda’s sympathetic look at the changing dynamics within a Japanese-American family. “The Wash really asks what the future is for Japanese America,” he explains. “With intermarriage at over 50 percent now and so many biracial children, what happens to our community? Will we continue to exist as a people, or should we be redefining ourselves?”
The Wash tells its story of an embattled family by means of precisely nuanced, understated naturalism. Heated emotions bubble just under the surface of strained civility—a common atmosphere in many Japanese-American households, says the playwright. In the more recent Yankee Dawg You Die, Gotanda takes another stylistic tack, mingling lyrical realism with broad, cartoonish satire.
With a nod to David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, the play mines the inherent tensions in a confrontation between an ambitious young thespian and his older, more successful colleague. It also raises issues specific to Asian-American performers, with comic glimpses of racist media stereotypes over the decades and harrowing combat stories about actors who changed their names, faces and principles to fit into the Hollywood concept of “Oriental.”
Yankee Dawg is Gotanda’s homage to the legion of frustrated Asian-American actors he has worked with. “Over the years I would hear them telling stories about what it was like to work in the ‘industry,’” he recalls. “There were two agendas: The older actors who had risen up the ranks through the Chop Suey nightclub circuit and who played any film part they could get, and the younger ones who came up through the Asian-American theatre route with strong political ideas about roles they would and wouldn’t play. I just put one of each into the same room and let them go at each other. They’re both composite characters, but every story they tell is true.”
If his characters seem conflicted, Gotanda appears to move gracefully between the vital but financially strapped world of ethnic theatre and the bigger-budget, higher-profile world of regional theatre. “Theatres across the country are just getting interested in Asian-American plays,” he remarks. “Working at the Taper, Berkeley Rep and the Eureka have been very positive experiences—but I don’t think Asian-American artists should stop working in Asian-American theatres just because were starting to ‘mainstream.’ Places like AATC, Pan Asian Repertory and East West Players are our blood source. In terms of surviving artistically and with our spirits intact, we have to keep working together.”
Gotanda stays in close touch with AATC, sharing dramaturg duties for the company with Hwang. He is also active in a new Northern California production alliance that includes AATC, El Teatro Campesino and two black groups, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and the Oakland Ensemble Theatre. “I’m worried about our mutual survival,” Gotanda asserts. “We have to work together as a political front to make funding agencies realize that they can’t ignore us. We are the conduit for the visions of a pluralistic America.”
For his part, Gotanda intends to keep on writing plays about Asian-American concerns, and he looks forward to branching into independent films. In either medium he hopes to always create characters who can’t be easily dismissed. “One of the best ways to really deal with ethnic stereotypes is to create images of complex human beings,” he contends. “Once that happens, the stereotypes become diffused—they no longer hold the same power.”
Misha Berson is a San Francisco theatre critic and an instructor at San Francisco State University.
