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For more than 40 years, Philip Kan Gotanda has been writing plays, screenplays, and opera librettos that speak to the Asian-American experience. Many of his stage plays, such as After The War Blues and Sisters Matsumoto, center on the trauma and aftermath of World War II incarceration camps. Other plays, such as Yankee Dawg You Die, reveal the lack of opportunities and roles for Asian Americans in Hollywood; and another play, The Wash (which he also adapted for film), focuses on an old, bigoted, Japanese-American traditionalist unable to reconcile the needs of his wife and two daughters with his own conservative view on life.
With the depth and breadth of these plays, Gotanda, along with his contemporary David Henry Hwang, is credited with changing the landscape and carving a pathway for Asian-American playwrights in American theater. Gotanda is also a professor at University of California-Berkeley and the winner of numerous fellowships, such as the Guggenheim, Sundance, and Lila Wallace. More recently, he received the 2021 Dramatist Guild Foundation Legacy Award, was a 2023 Inductee to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and this year received the 2024Â United States Artists Fellowship Award.
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Recently he wrote the libretto for Both Eyes Open, an original opera with music by Max Giteck Duykers about a farmer and his wife in 1942 after Executive Order 9066 was enacted to imprison Japanese Americans.
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“One of the things I’ve done with my career is, I’ve always wanted to both explore thematically the issues. … not only Asian America but in relationship to other communities; African American, Latinx,” Gotana says. “But also I’ve been interested in making sure I challenge myself in terms of the form — you know, to go from songs to plays to movies, and then finally now I wanted to try opera.”
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Kathy Hsieh and William Earl Ray in “Yohen,” produced by PassinArt and Portland Playhouse. Photo: Owen Carey
“Asian American playwrights now have arrived as they have almost everywhere in terms of the media, and it isn’t just, they’re here for a bit, you know, they’re kind of a fad.’ They’re here,” he says. “Asian-American playwrights are kind of at the foreground and are kind of main players in … American theater.”
In Portland, PassinArt: A Theatre Company, in partnership with Portland Playhouse, is producing Yohen, Gotanda’s play about an older interracial couple who have weathered 37 years of love and are now at a crossroads of their marriage. I’m directing Yohen, which features veteran actors Kathy Hsieh as a Japanese American military bride and William Earl Ray as the retired serviceman who now finds joy mentoring youth by teaching them how to box, and was happy to have a conversation with Gotanda about the play and his sterling career.
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Yohen at PassinArt.org
- Where: Brunish Theatre, Portland’5 Centers for the Arts, Antoinette Hatfield Hall, 1111 S.W. Broadway
- Previews: March 27 & 28 at 7:30 p.m.
- Regular Performances: March 29 through April 21
- Thursday and Friday performances at 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday and Sunday performances at 2 p.m.