After The War is considered to be one of the most iconic and ground breaking works of influential playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, who was appointed as a tenured faculty member at the University of California Berkeley's department of theatre, dance and performance studies in 2014. The staging of Gotanda’s play at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum that I viewed recently was markedly different and unique from how the play was first enacted on stage at the American Conservatory Theatre in the 2006-07 period. The play was renamed After The War Blues, and instead of being presented as a theatre production enactment, it was more an exchange of dialogue between the principal characters .
In Gotanda’s view, this representation and recreation of a well-known body of work is a classic example of Philip’s Rule of Three that he has coined and has come to believe in whole heartedly in a pay writing career spanning some 35 years. Gotanda believes that it takes at least three productions before any theatre team is able to do justice to a play, and this holds true for After The War Blues as well.
While the setting remain unchanged, that is the story the actors on stage narrate still transpires in San Francisco, but the first noticeable difference was the stage backdrop. Both the original, and the recent re-staging at the museum were directed by Steven Anthony Jones, and it is to him that Gotanda credits most of the significant changes in how the story was recreated. Instead of the rambling and imposing multi-storey, Victorian era rotating house that had been the centrepiece of the original, the new one opened with a heart-touching, sad duet performed by trumpeter Brendan Liu and scat singer Mark Vinzant and acted by the play’s central protagonist Chet Monkawa.
Set in the Fillmore District of Japan Town in San Francisco, the narrative relates the story of the Japanese Americans who returned from internment camps once the World War II came to an end. In their absence, the African American community had taken up residence in San Francisco, where they had come looking for work . Once the Japanese camp returnees began to come back to the area they called home, they found it alienated, changed and taken over by the blacks. This created racial tensions between both groups, and both Gotanda and Jones wanted to make these inter-race differences more prominent and explicit in order to convey how life changed for both communities once the war had ended.
What the re-enactment also brought to the surface was how the arrival of immigrants from the Southern states as well as that of the Jews from Russia, added to the cultural complexity and economic conflicts between the different communities . The impending conflicts that threatened to disrupt the new found peace in which each community was competing for limited jobs, houses and other resources, forms the central theme of the story. This is where the theories of acculturation and ethnocentrism that were part of the course could be observed. The different communities were each trying to find their own place in the new world order that was forming in the United States and the discrimination they faced from the native American population also came to the surface.
Using Monkawa’s struggles to relate to a neighbourhood, as he returns to his family home after the war, that had completely changed with new faces, people practicing different religions and living in a society that had been essentially dominated by Japanese Americans, the play aims to present a picture of how the lives of ethnic minorities were affected by the war and how they fought to make a new life and earn a living after having gone through the trauma of a war that had pitched Japan as an enemy of the United States, the country they called home.
Works Cited
Kan, Philip. "AFTER THE WAR BLUES AND PHILIP KAN GOTANDA MASTER CLASS." 21 April 2016. Theatre Diaspora. Online. 25 April 2016.
