Swimming Against the Tide : Philip Kan Gotanda’s ‘Fish Head Soup’ is his latest effort to chronicle Japanese America while challenging constraints on Asian artists.

Philip Kan Gotanda is one of only a few well-known Asian-American writers in a business that remains remarkably resistant to such talents. He has received two major Los Angeles productions in recent years and is the only Asian playwright besides David Henry Hwang who’s likely to lay claim to such a credit in the foreseeable future.

He’s cracked the main stages of New York and Los Angeles theaters, won Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA and McKnight fellowships and snared enough other honors, awards and accolades to pad several resumes. Recently, he landed the prestigious Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a three-year grant that’s supporting his projects at East West Players.

“Philip captures the soul of Japanese America,” says Eric Hayashi, artistic director of San Francisco’s Asian-American Theater. “He tackles tough subjects that a lot of Japanese-Americans wouldn’t want aired. But he shows us as multidimensional people. It’s not formulaic work at all.”

So don’t tell all those grant-givers and artistic directors that Gotanda doesn’t call himself a dramatist.

“I’ve never thought of playwriting as my career,” he demurs, trying his charming best to wiggle out of the single-word description as he sits in the office of East West’s Silver Lake theater, where his “Fish Head Soup” opens Wednesday, directed by Mark Taper Forum resident director Oskar Eustis. “I fell into it by accident. I love theater and I write plays, but I don’t see myself just as a playwright.”

Chalk the reluctance up to burnout. Or to an overdose of the kind of ethnic pigeonholing that nonwhite theater artists face. Or to a bit more than his share of both lately--even if they are what comes with the territory of success.

“I reached a point where the writing I was doing felt like a straitjacket,” Gotanda says. “Theater had stopped being fun for me.”

So far, the antidote has been diversification. Recently, the putative playwright has directed a play; written, directed, produced and acted in a short film; begun a spoken word piece; collaborated on a musical, and launched other projects. It got him out of the writing rut all right, but it has also helped Gotanda fight the other constraints still facing Asian-American artists.

Despite all the water under the “Miss Saigon” bridge, Asian-Americans continue to battle for creative opportunities. Yet in a way that’s distinct from such groups as African-Americans and Latinos, they face prejudices that have left them pointedly, if quietly, omitted from many agendas and schedules.

“Particularly now, Asian-Americans are left out,” Gotanda says. “They’re ‘insidious’ at the same time there’s this feeling of knowing them. It’s a peculiar double-bind. You get the worst of both worlds.

“Given the rise in anti-Asian sentiment and Japan bashing, nothing surprises me anymore in what I read about and what I experience in terms of being Asian. The consciousness is raised at the same time you have the most ugly, overt forms of racism in your face.”

Gotanda began writing “Fish Head Soup” about 10 years ago, “the longest haul ever” for one of his scripts. “I have two binders full of notes taken and things that were tried and thrown out. It’s one of these plays that I kept going back to and never gave up on.

“The initial script had people running around with fish-heads on,” Gotanda says of the work he now describes as “traditional--three acts, a classic setup.” Eustis has been working on the current version with the playwright since 1988. The script was workshopped at the Mark before its 1991 premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, also under Eustis’ direction.

“Fish Head Soup,” like the author’s “Song for a Nissei Fisherman” and “The Wash,” is a portrait of a Japanese-American family in conflict. Sparked by the return of a long-absent son, a mother, father and brother are forced to deal with personal demons as well as the inherent contradictions of Asian-American acculturation.

The setting is the family stomping grounds in the San Joaquin Valley, not far from the scene of Gotanda’s own Stockton childhood. “A lot of it is filled with my own world, not in content but in tone,” he says. “I was trying to go back in time a bit to that world which was so full for me.”

Gotanda only halfheartedly dodges the suggestion that the play’s autobiographical elements may have been what attenuated its writing. “For the longest time, I didn’t think much about my childhood,” he says. “I had a good childhood, but my wife (actress Diane Takei) always asks, ‘Why can’t you remember anything about it?’ ”

What Gotanda does recall are some of the same rich images that shade “Fish Head Soup.” “There are certain visuals that I see all the time: wet, thick fog and the fishing smells of the tules and the delta,” he says. “During autumn and late winter, the area is foggy in a way that’s almost spooky.”

Gotanda’s father, a family practitioner born and raised in Hawaii, was an avid fisherman who often took his three sons on early morning quests for striped bass.

“This was a time when you could still catch fish and eat them,” Gotanda recalls. “I remember these big fish being pulled into the boat and flopping around. We’d take them home in a gunny sack and my dad would clean them. Then we’d eat sashimi for dinner, while my dad would make this big pot of soup with the head.”

Gotanda’s late father attended college in California and went on to medical school at the University of Arkansas where he had a scholarship. “There was my dad and his roommate, who was Jewish. Everybody else was WASPy. My dad used to joke about ‘the Jap and the Jew’ being put together.”

The ironic capper to those years was that Gotanda Sr. returned to California to practice medicine, only to be shipped back--along with his Stockton-reared bride--to a camp in Arkansas when the war broke out.

Gotanda, the youngest of the couple’s three post-war babies, attended UC Santa Cruz before going to Japan on an exchange program. After more than a year and a half abroad, during which time he fell in love with pottery and ditched his exchange program, Gotanda returned to the U.S.

He took a degree in Japanese art, went to law school and eventually segued into music. In addition to songs, Gotanda wrote his first musical, “The Avocado Kid,” while working as a legal aide in San Francisco (where he still lives). He sent that script to East West Players and found himself pointed in a direction that has dominated his work in the theater for more than a decade now.

Although the style varies from semi-fantastical to living room realism, Gotanda’s body of work is marked by a consistent concern with things and themes Japanese-American. “Early on, it was more conscious than unconscious,” he says.

Practically speaking, Gotanda also found that there were places that were interested in the culturally-specific vision he had to offer. “There were theaters and a certain kind of movement around that allowed me to tell these stories,” he says, referring in part to organizations such as East West and San Francisco’s Asian-American Theater, where Gotanda took a workshop in the mid-’70s. The theater, for which Gotanda is now dramaturge, first produced the then-fledgling writer’s work in their 1979-1980 season. “There was great depth to his work,” recalls Hayashi. “It was startling to see a young playwright writing with that kind of texture.”

East West and Asian-American Theater are two of only four full-time Asian-American theaters in the United States. East West, the oldest of the group, was founded in 1965 by a group of theater artists and friends. Asian-American Theater, New York’s Pan Asian Repertory Theater and Seattle’s Northwest Asian-American Theater were all launched during the ‘70s. There are also several part-time producing companies in the U.S. and Canada. To Gotanda, these places are “key.”

“They don’t have a lot of money, but they’re the only places you can go where there’s an implicit understanding of what the lay of the land is,” he says. “The productions will be the purest expression of whatever this Asian-American aesthetic is, just because everyone is sharing a shorthand.”

Gotanda has ongoing affiliations with mainstream theaters such as the Mark Taper Forum, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Manhattan Theater Club, but he’s shown no inclination to abandon the smaller organizations. “East West and the Asian-American Theater company are places that I must continue to work at because they provide a continuum that I have participated in creating and would like to see continue,” he says.

The big theaters also matter, though. The late Los Angeles Theatre Center imported the Berkeley Repertory Theater production of “Yankee Dawg You Die” in 1988. Pitting an aging character actor (played by Sab Shimono) against a younger actor (Kelvin Han Yee), the play tackles the Hollywood conundrum of idealism versus survivalism.

Former Times theater critic Dan Sullivan called “Yankee Dawg You Die,” which went on to New York’s Playwrights Horizons in 1990, “. . . an engaging script that doesn’t want to pound its message into the ground,” but complained that the play did “back off from confrontation.”

Two years ago, Gotanda’s “The Wash” became only the second Asian-American work ever to make it to the Taper main stage, and it took seven years to get there. After an initial Taper workshop in 1984, the play ran at the Asian-American Theater in San Francisco and was made into a 1988 PBS American Playhouse film. When the Manhattan Theater Club decided to stage the intergenerational drama, the Taper came on board as a co-producer.

The production featured Shimono and East West artistic director Nobu McCarthy in the leads. “As a spare, subtle marital drama, ‘The Wash’ is fairly engaging,” wrote Don Shirley in The Times. “But the play, more than the movie, aims for something beyond a domestic chronicle that could take place in any culture. Gotanda’s story is so ‘universal’ that it never becomes as distinctive as it should.”

Following the Los Angeles run of “Fish Head Soup” (also starring Shimono and McCarthy), Gotanda will direct the work’s San Francisco staging. New York and Seattle outings are also booked. He is also collaborating with Dan Kuramoto, keyboardist for the jazz-fusion group Hiroshima and composer of the score for “Fish Head Soup,” on a musical for the Taper. Still, Gotanda says: “ ‘Fish Head Soup’ ends an era for me. I see my work following in different directions.”

If nothing else, he’s changed his work habits. His recent “Knife in the Heart”--a “stream of consciousness play about a man who slowly gets ripped apart,” written for the Manhattan Theater Club--took only 2 1/2 weeks to pen.

“Different directions,” however, doesn’t only mean he’ll be writing different kinds of plays. Later in the East West season, Gotanda, who directed last year’s premiere of Rick Shiomi’s “Uncle Tadao” there, will direct Hwang’s “House of Sleeping Beauties.” He also sits on the board of Theatre Communications Group and will have a volume of his plays out next year from the University of Washington Press.

Perhaps most important, though, is the artist’s segue into film. Gotanda recently wrote and directed a short called “The Kiss,” which has been accepted for this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “I’d been wanting to direct a film for a couple of years, but it’s hard to get people to give you the opportunity,” he says. “I finally said, ‘Why not just go do it yourself?’ ”

Gotanda has also completed a feature-length script for which he is raising money. “I want to move into making my own films,” he says. ‘It will be a low-budget shoot in San Francisco with all my actor friends, a guerrilla approach to filmmaking.”

This independent strategy is born partly of Gotanda’s desire for artistic autonomy and partly of the film/TV industry status quo. “In film and television, Asian-Americans are shut out,” Gotanda says. “At least we used to have houseboys and assistants, and once in a while you’d have Pat Morita have something happen. I just want to see a good Asian-American sitcom.”

Yet with the specter of “Miss Saigon” still looming large over any discussion of Asian-American theater artists, it isn’t as though the stage can claim much higher ground than the screen. Gotanda, in fact, has had firsthand experience of the ongoing limits facing Asian-American artists.

After the successful Berkeley production of “Fish Head Soup,” which made money for the theater and garnered the playwright “some of the best notices I’ve ever gotten,” Gotanda sent the script to other theaters that had shown an interest.

“There were a lot of theaters around the country waiting for my next piece, saying, ‘We want to do it,’ ” Gotanda recalls. “So I sent the piece out and none of them were interested.

“Granted, no piece is perfect, but something else was going on,” Gotanda continues. “I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, so I took it to my Asian-American friends and writers and our consensus was that the play is out of the norm of what people expect from an Asian-American play. People are raw and passionate in (the play) and there’s subtextual violence percolating.”

The story would have ended there, except for a turn of the tide that supports Gotanda’s theory of “something else” going on. “Then Japan-bashing started to escalate and the play became sexy again,” Gotanda says. “I started receiving phone calls. The same people who’d rejected the play were now interested in doing it. It’s so peculiar: Whatever is floating around at the time can dictate the interest.”

“There are problems for a playwright with the cachet that Philip or David Hwang has,” says the Asian-American Theater’s Hayashi. “Philip is the Japanese American playwright being produced by the major (theaters) and some of his plays don’t necessarily fit the vision of what a major wants to have said about Japanese-Americans.

“You’re talking about a tough subject--the roots of why the family in ‘Fish Head Soup’ is apart have to do with questions of what is Japanese-American versus Japanese, and what the white-Asian love-hate relationship is--and that may have been the problem,” Hayashi continues. “It’s his most O’Neill-ish play. Philip doesn’t candy-coat anything.”

Go-rounds like that are hard enough on veterans like Gotanda that it makes the odds facing younger playwrights seem prohibitive. And Gotanda, who has a mandate from East West to seek and present the next generation of talent, concurs. “Four or five years ago I wasn’t seeing new writers coming along,” he says. “Why bang your head against a wall in these small theaters trying to say things a lot of people don’t want to hear? Why not do TV, film? They pay more.”

The reason, it seems, is the same one that keeps Gotanda coming back to the small theaters. “In the last five years, I have seen new voices emerging,” he concedes. “They belong to people who have to say something or they’re going to explode. That’s what it takes. That’s why I got into it. In this format, I had a context and people listening to me. There were things I had to say that I couldn’t say anywhere else.”