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 2024 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.
“One of the things I’ve done with my career is, I’ve always wanted to both explore thematically the issues….
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