Philip Kan Gotanda began to question his dream of becoming the musical voice of Asian America the night he was upstaged by a stripper. It was 1974, and Gotanda, then 23, was at an open mic night in San Francisco’s North Beach, a neighborhood thick with topless clubs. Inspired by the Asian American movement exploding around him, he took the stage in a worn flannel shirt and faded Levi’s, singing his song “Asian American Dream.” But mid-set, a stripper from the club next door—“not Carol Doda,” he clarifies—wandered in, made her way onstage, and started dancing. The audience erupted in hoots and cheers. “I was singing, baring my yellow soul, as it were,” he says. “Right then, I knew this was not what I had in mind for my life.” Later that year, he applied for law school.
Gotanda’s dream of becoming the musical voice of Asian America never panned out, but he did become one of its greatest dramatic voices and the nation’s most celebrated and prolific chronicler of the Japanese American experience. This spring afternoon, he’s sitting in the original Peet’s Coffee in Berkeley, wearing round tortoiseshell spectacles, a blue T-shirt, and jeans. He’s been a professor in UC Berkeley’s theater department since 2014, due to retire this summer. In addition to musical compositions, films, song cycles, and an opera, Gotanda has written more than 30 plays, many staged by Los Angeles’s East West Players, in Little Tokyo. The country’s premier Asian American theater organization and one of its longest-running theaters of color, EWP is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. To mark that milestone, the company is restaging several contemporary classics, including Gotanda’s 1988 play, Yankee Dawg You Die.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Set in Los Angeles, the play draws heavily from his experiences at Asian American theaters like East West. Even so, he says, his decades-long career in the theater “happened pretty much by accident.… I didn’t study theater, playwriting, or anything.… I just kept doing it and learning more, doing it and learning more, and eventually I kind of felt better about doing it.”
DISRUPTED DREAMS
Gotanda grew up the youngest of three sons in Stockton. His childhood was typical for a third-generation Japanese American: baseball and basketball in JA sports leagues, violin and piano lessons before he discovered Dylan. But his parents’ experiences loomed over him. His father, one of 13 siblings growing up poor on Kauai, dreamed of becoming a doctor. But college was for rich haoles—white people. He paid his way through college in California working as a professor’s houseboy. After Pearl Harbor, he and Gotanda’s mother were forcibly removed to the Japanese American concentration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas.
Gotanda remembers a day in his childhood when a woman from the Daughters of the American Revolution came to their door soliciting donations. “My mother just went off on her,” he says. “ ‘You people put us in the camps!’ ” When the family moved to a white neighborhood, Gotanda’s mother advised, “Philip, you can have white friends, but if anything bad happens, they’ll turn on you. Now go play.”
Gotanda believed in the inevitability, and even the rightness, of his rock and roll dreams. In 1969, he left Stockton to study psychology at UC Santa Cruz, when the Asian American movement was in its ascendancy. “I believed the world wanted to hear my songs about Asian America,” he says. “I believed in my songs, felt that more than marginal, they were on the cusp of this new, emerging America.”
Like many parents who are Nisei (the U.S.-born children of Japanese immigrants), however, his father saw two paths for his sons: doctor or lawyer. A career in the arts was for haoles or laggards. In 1974, Gotanda began attending Hastings College of the Law (now UC Law San Francisco). Then, just weeks into his studies, thieves broke into his studio apartment and stole his guitars and tape recorders. Left with only one guitar and focused on schoolwork, he wondered if this was a sign to leave music behind. Still, “I thought, Maybe I could write a musical,” he says. “I knew how to write songs, and a musical seemed like something you could do while going to law school.”
Gotanda began work on a musical inspired by the story of Momotaro, a Japanese folk hero who is born from a giant peach and becomes a mighty warrior. But in Gotanda’s version, The Avocado Kid, or Zen in the Art of Guacamole, the hero was a pacifist, vegetarian, saxophone-playing Japanese American slacker—a far cry from the dutiful, masculine archetype of the original. Gotanda’s score moved from ballads to rock anthems to scat battles. He recorded the songs on a cassette, which found its way to Mako, the acclaimed actor who’d received an Oscar nomination for the 1966 war film The Sand Pebbles and then the artistic director of East West Players.
Mako phoned Gotanda and invited him to L.A. Gotanda packed his guitar in his Datsun 510 station wagon and headed south. When he arrived, Mako asked him to perform right away, and Gotanda sang the entire musical from memory. Mako gave him the green light on the spot, with one catch: The production had to start as soon as possible. “I told him, ‘I’m kind of studying for the bar,’” Gotanda says. He returned north to think about it—and never took the bar.
When he staged The Avocado Kid at EWP that winter of 1979, the theater company was 14 years old and had already survived crooked landlords, a change of venue—from a church basement in Silver Lake to a former supermarket in East Hollywood—and creative disagreements among its founders over whether to focus on emerging Asian American voices or classic playwrights like Tennessee Williams.
One of the company’s defining productions was Pacific Overtures, Stephen Sondheim’s ambitious musical based on the “opening” of Japan to trade by American gunboats in 1853. When it premiered on Broadway in 1976, Mako originated the roles of the Reciter and the Shogun, for which he received a Tony nomination for Best Actor. EWP staged Pacific Overtures several times—in 1979, in 1998, and again in 2024—each revival offering new generations of Asian American actors rare opportunities to perform in complex, challenging roles, something those productions have in common with Gotanda’s nearly five decades’ worth of plays.
That first production of The Avocado Kid was transformative for Gotanda. “It was my own creative work, and it had finally reached a larger audience,” he says. “I was feeling like this was the life of an artist—leaving college, leaving home.”
During the run, Gotanda met David Henry Hwang, then an English major at Stanford who was home for Christmas break. “I was interested in writing plays, and he was having his first show, so we met up at East West,” Hwang recalls. He was also a musician—a violinist—and they began jamming together in a practice studio at EWP. The friends formed a band, recording folk-rock songs like “All American Asian Punk” and “Ballad of the Issei” and performing on college campuses and at Asian American events. After a few years, both turned their attention fully to theater. Hwang directed a couple of Gotanda’s plays and would win a Tony in 1998 for writing M. Butterfly. “I’m pretty confident I made the right choice to focus on theater,” Hwang says.
YANKEE DOG DAYS
Back at Peet’s, Gotanda is leafing through a stack of old programs and flyers from some of his past shows that I brought along, as well as a stained script of The Avocado Kid that I may or may not have swiped from him when I first met him years ago. “That’s probably either coffee or wine,” he says, laughing.
Gotanda comes upon a flyer for A Song for a Nisei Fisherman, which began as a workshop at Stanford before moving to downtown L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum and EWP. The play centers on a Japanese American father who, like Gotanda’s dad, attends medical school in Arkansas and returns years later as a prisoner at an internment camp. By the end, the father is berating his youngest son for leaving law school to write stories, like a “regular bum.” The son is even writing a story about his dad. “Who cares about that stuff?” the father asks—a moment inspired by Gotanda’s own strained relationship with his dad.
More plays followed, including Bullet Headed Birds, about two Asian American musicians “in search of the Asian American sound,” a work loosely based on Gotanda’s collaborations with Hwang. By the time he set about writing his eighth play, Yankee Dawg You Die, Gotanda was fully immersed in Asian American theater, his work premiering at EWP, San Francisco’s Asian American Theater Company, and Jean Erdman and Joseph Campbell’s Theater of the Open Eye.
Yankee Dawg tells the story of two Asian American actors: Vincent Chang, a veteran of the “chop suey circuit” who boasts about never turning down a part, no matter how degrading, and Bradley Yamashita, an idealistic newcomer who dreams of better roles and representation. The conflict between them mirrors the real stories Gotanda heard about older performers, like Japanese American Goro Suzuki, who changed his name to Jack Soo (Barney Miller, Flower Drum Song) to escape prejudice, and Mako, who struggled to find work immediately after his Oscar nomination.
“Phil isn’t afraid to tackle the hard issues: racism, discrimination, the Japanese incarceration,” says Lily Tung Crystal, the artistic director of EWP. “But he doesn’t preach or turn them into history lessons. He really gets to the emotion and heart of the characters.”
As EWP celebrates its 60th anniversary, it has staged a season highlighting its impact: It opened with Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, featuring songs by Dengue Fever performed onstage by a live band, and will close with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, reimagined with a new book by Hwang. Nestled in the middle this summer was Yankee Dawg You Die, a fitting tribute to Gotanda’s exploration of Asian American identity and the theater that helped nurture it.
“East West is the most successful Asian American theater company,” says Esther Kim Lee, author of the book A History of Asian American Theatre. “Its proximity to the whole film industry made it possible for them to now truly claim that 75 percent of AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] actors have gone through them.”
In retirement from teaching, he’ll be focusing on new projects, including a memoir. There will be a lot to write about: nearly three dozen plays; his forays into indie filmmaking (all three films were screened at Sundance); his chamber opera (Both Eyes Open had its West Coast premiere in 2022); his collaborations with actors George Takei, John Cho, and B.D. Wong; his long friendship with Hwang; and, of course, his relationship with his father, who died in 1983.
Gotanda’s father never fully accepted his decision to leave law for the arts. “He disowned me twice,” Gotanda says. “But I certainly can understand him in terms of where he came from. He grew up in the sticks of Kauai, fishing and hunting boar. He never wore shoes, so his feet were as hard as nails.” Despite the trials, he went on to become a successful doctor, and now he has a son who wants to, what, play music? Write plays?
But a year before he died, Gotanda’s father reluctantly attended a production of A Song for a Nisei Fisherman. After the show, Gotanda stood quietly in the back of the theater as his father approached. Without a word, his father nodded and grunted.
“This was about as much affirmation as I could get,” Gotanda says, smiling. “This was very good. And I was happy.”•
Robert Ito is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He writes about film, television, and theater for the New York Times.
