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Tess Lina as Eiko Hanabi in the world premiere production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s The Wind Cries Mary at the San Jose Repertory Theare.
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From ‘Oriental’ to ‘Asian American’
Philip Kan Gotanda returns to the turbulent 1960s
By Terry Hong
Special to AsianWeek
When Philip Kan Gotanda sat down to envision his latest play, he thought he might try his hand at writing about “wealthy CEOs living in Silicon Valley.” For a playwright best known for capturing Asian Pacific American, more specifically, Japanese American life — The Wash, The Ballad of Yachiyo, Sisters Matsumoto — such a subject was certainly a departure. “But after interviewing several [CEOs], I couldn’t find anything of dramatic interest I wanted to write about. Remarkable folk, boring lives.” You gotta love that bluntness.
So he went back to a suggestion made earlier by San Jose Repertory Theatre’s artistic director, Timothy Near, that he adapt Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Gotanda’s first reaction — “just what the world needs, another Hedda adaptation” — became The Wind Cries Mary, which makes its world premiere at San Jose Rep, Oct. 19 through Nov. 17.
Gotanda’s Hedda is Eiko Hanabi, an accomplished, independent young woman who is newly married to a would-be academic, Raymond Pemberthy. That her name is “Hanabi” — Japanese for “fireworks” — is no coincidence. She is a woman on the verge of combusting with secrets, frustrations and ambitions that can no longer be contained. Her world, too — San Francisco during the late 1960s, when the protest against the Vietnam War converged with the height of the Civil Rights movement, not to mention the craze of rock ‘n roll — is on the verge of blowing apart and becoming a brave new world.
Campuses are ablaze with change. At San Francisco State University, students of Asian descent unite with other minority students in demanding an Ethnic Studies Department, with a component devoted specifically to an APA perspective. “Such a beast had never existed anywhere before. Ever,” Gotanda writes in the preface for the play’s program. “Segments of the Asian American populace, especially those in the age range of 25 to 35, were caught in the midst of America’s changing consciousness of identity, leaving them unsure as to whether they were Oriental or Asian American.”
Such is the context for The Wind Cries Mary. “I’d been wanting to do a story about the late ’60s,” says Gotanda, “in particular about the period when the concept of the Asian American was coming into being as a social force. I was most intrigued by someone caught on the cusp of that change with a foot in the old world and another in the world that was to become — someone who had invested her life into being a successful ‘Oriental American,’ playing by the old established rules, negotiating and navigating and by some standards, ultimately winning. But she wins only to find her Oriental American safe haven suddenly intruded upon by a new emergent consciousness, one that she knows holds truth and thus challenges and undermines all her life choices.”
Into that safe haven of Eiko’s fragile domesticity comes Rachel Auwinger-now-Cohen, the troubled, hapa wife of a hippie psychiatrist/professor from Oregon. She brings with her the notes of a brilliant paper written by a revolutionary visionary, Miles Katayama, who is being considered for the same teaching position as Eiko’s new husband. Miles, Rachel announces, has come south in search of a “woman who nearly drove him mad” in the past, a woman he calls Mary. But we know better.
Enter the evil Dr. Nakada, a preening self-described “Oriental professor.” Says actor Sab Shimono, who has been seen on Gotanda’s stages and screens for over 20 years, “Takada is mad, a control freak, a man in search of power. But Philip’s writing is so good that I don’t have to manufacture anything. It’s all right there in the writing.”
Nakada’s prime objective is Eiko. His shrewdness about Eiko is uncanny: “She is beautiful, brilliant and, of course, knows it. And yet, her burden is that she also knows she doesn’t fit in anywhere. What a cruel fate. Why was she given all this, if she can’t really be free to enjoy the fruits of her plentiful gifts? Why?” And tragically, he is not wrong about her, as she attempts to navigate through this new world with her dignity and individuality somehow intact.
Tess Lina, a New York-based, Julliard-trained actress who plays Eiko, says, “Eiko is the universal Asian American woman. She struggles not only with female issues, but race issues, as well. She says the things I wish I could say.” Lina, who is making her Gotanda debut, says of his Hedda, “She’s bold, really bold, in the same way Ibsen’s Hedda was so bold in her time. The whole play has been transplanted into something we understand and recognize.”
The play’s director, Eric Simonson (Tony-nominee for The Song of Jacob Zulu, Oscar and Emmy-nominee for On Tiptoe), concurs: “The Wind Cries Mary speaks to people’s hopes and aspirations. In that way, there’s a sense of timelessness to this play.”
For all the universality of the story, Gotanda undoubtedly explores unfamiliar theatrical territory with Mary. As he did in his recent Sisters Matsumoto which was the first play to deal with what happened after the Japanese American internees were released and returned to what had been home, Gotanda captures another time period that has until now been absent from the stage. “The play will stir up a lot of issues,” Lina predicts. “There will be very strong responses from every part of the audience: there will be Vietnam vets, Japanese American internees, young Asian Americans who have no sense of what happened in the 1960s, and so many others.” Moreover, because of the subject matter, APA and non-Asian audiences are also likely to respond differently. “Because their life experiences are different,” says Simonson. “Similarly, a person from Japan will look at the piece differently from a Japanese American born in the U.S.”
But according to Gotanda, “there’s plenty there for everyone to access the material and enter the world. More than color, ethnicity or culture, it’s simply a matter of knowing your American history. For a while now I’ve chosen to assume audiences know or will hopefully come to know certain Asian American-centric issues in my work. Otherwise, I’m forever reinventing the wheel, accommodating, rather than believing the work has any impact on transforming an audience’s awareness. I think it’s a disservice to the work, the artist and, most importantly, the audience to not be asked to bring larger territories of knowledge with them when they enter the theater, to grow for drama and become a larger citizen of the world.”
Gotanda, himself, through the years has progressively become a larger citizen of the world. While his more than a dozen plays — from The Avocado Kid or Zen in the Art of Guacamole, to Yankee Dawg You Die, to Day Standing on Its Head — and his three films — The Kiss, Drinking Tea and Life Tastes Good — have played in many of the country’s most important theaters, he’s recently gone global with a production of The Ballad of Yachiyo at London’s Gate Theatre last year and an upcoming new Japanese translation of A Song for a Nisei Fisherman set to open at Tokyo’s Maple Leaf Theatre next season.
And lest you think he’s resting on his laurels, he remains ever-busy, working on an adaptation of the classic Rashomon for San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and adapting Sisters Matsumoto into a screenplay for his next film. He’s also got a “couple of other plays, and a screenplay for some well-known producers,” he adds.
“And that’s about it,” he says.
For more information about The Wind Cries Mary, go to www.sjrep.com or call the San Jose Rep box office at 408-367-7255.
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