All In One Boat

Phillip Kan Gotanda is a San Francisco playwright so it was particularly interesting to see his “After the War,” about the Fillmore District of San Francisco in 1948, at ACT on Geary Street in San Francisco, 2007. Geary heads straight out to Japan Town, where Geary crosses Fillmore Street coming down from tony Pacific Heights past the Western Addition to cross Haight where the old Fillmore district is now called Haight-Fillmore. [And it gets more interesting: the people of the Fillmore were once almost entirely Japanese descended. When they were forced out into the camps during WW II and African Americans made their way into the the shipyards and other war related work of the Bay Area they took over the abandoned houses, in the process turning the Fillmore into Harlem West, the west coast home of all the great jazz men and women of those years.]

The play starts out slowly, and somewhat dizzyingly as the rotating stage introduces us quickly to the rooms and people of the boarding house which is the set for the duration of the play. As the characters and their situations become settled, the pacing and the rotating, creaking set become part of the lives we watch unfolding from the darkness. These are lives we are not accustomed to seeing in mainstream theater or film, not because they are freaks but because these utterly normal people, for all their presence in the life of the nation, have not been part of its narrative. Gotanda has made it his life’s work in the theater to show on the public stage, more of those whose lives and stories have made America what it is. Here, going beyond the more intimate scale of his earlier plays, he tackles the seams and unruly knots of the fabric.

Chester Monkawa has come back to the Fillmore after three years in Internment camps, where he was one of the No-No boys, those young men who refused to swear allegiance to the United States or to serve in the US Military. Why, they wanted to know, were some citizens, because of family backgrounds, being asked to swear allegiance while other citizens were not asked. The house was his family’s house before they were sent away. Chester has returned to reclaim it and try to make a go of renting out rooms. He had spent time in Chicago as a jazz trumpeter before the war and fits comfortably into the mixed race Fillmore district. One of the boarders, and major character in the play is Earl Worthington, a “colored man” who likes Perry Como to the disbelief of the others, and admires Chet’s way around the trumpet and the Negro jazz scene.

The action unfolds as Chet and Earl watch their friendship stressed beyond repair under the influences of close-in living and multiple relationships. Earl’s wife has left him and has found another man as her sister indelicately puts it, trying to place herself in her straying sister’s place. The sister, though bonded by blood and culture can’t dislodge the sexual and emotional tug of Marie-Louise, a blond transplant from Oklahoma, living in the house with her somewhat retarded brother, and making a living as a dance-hall girl. That she had known Chet in Chicago years before and is still drawn to him is one of the key disturbers of their lives.

Chet’s struggle with his position in America and the eyes of his racial family is another driving force: the war split the wider Japanese & American community; Chet’s brother signing up to fight, and then dying; Chet refusing to go and then blaming himself for his brother’s death. Lillian, once the brother’s fiance, is also living in the house and gradually comes to love the “bad brother,” hearing his music near the end of the play, and understanding what it means. Other characters include the rapacious Mr. Oto, a Japanese businessman and Olga, an eastern Russian who, like many Russians, had found a home in Yokohama, Japan. Olga, while paying off her “uncle’s” debt to Mr. Goto by entertaining him as a “visitor” in the house, has a real crush on the nebbishy Mr. Oji who is convinced he is much too homely to ever be loved. Gotanda has fun with the accents, and humorous misunderstandings. The language though, signals the deeper and multiple layers of belonging in all of the characters: Russian and Japanese; American and Japanese; Black and American; White and dangerously in love with a black man.

Perhaps Gotanda could have taken out a few of the characters to let those remaining develop a bit more, as some reviewers have suggested, but then the full spread of meaning would have been lost: in these boarding houses, as in America, were worlds of people struggling with ordinary human emotions. Until now they have remained unseen. He’s done a good job, stepping outside the smaller scale of his previous plays and putting a full tapestry before us.

You won’t regret an afternoon or evening spent in their company.

Other reviews:
Robert Hurwitt: The Chronicle;
Chad Jones: Inside Bay Area;

Janos Greben: The Examiner

I notice in all of these reviews there is some cautionary judgment about Gotanda’s “stridency” in Act II when Chet unloads his anger and his political motivation for his No-No actions. I didn’t find this strident and thought there might be more of it. Perhaps I would have let it simmer, and come out in more nuanced behavior, but perhaps not. The reaction of these critics however, points to the very problem Gotanda is trying to fix: certain behaviors and types of people are considered as ‘normal’, or expected. Those outside this norm are viewed as, well, as outside.

Of course there will always be norms and outside-the-norms in any society but when the pretense is that Group B is the norm for Super Group A, then Group C becomes invisible. There is a norm for Super Group A, yes, but it must include all of its subsets, A to Z. What is “strident” to Mr. Hewitt is not so strident to me. Chester Monkawa had good reason to shout, both at himself and at his country. Let it be seen, and more of it.