On Yankee Dawg You Die by Philip Kan Gotanda
Essay by Lloyd Suh
I moved to New York for drama school in 1998, and when my mother dropped me off at the Greyhound station (yes, I did in fact get off a bus from Indiana), she asked me to promise her I would never become an actor. There was really no danger of this, so I was incredulous about the request. But when I asked her why, she said “because I watch movies, so I know what they make us do. And I will not watch my son do those things.”
In Yankee Dawg You Die, Philip Kan Gotanda does do those things, but we watch them from the other side of the screen: we watch them from the perspective of actors forced to navigate those depictions, and we watch them explode. First staged in 1988, the play was responding to a media landscape probably far more brutal to Asian bodies than the one we live in now, but basically identical to the one my mother was recalling a decade later. The play doesn’t focus on the landscape itself – instead, the struggle we’re watching is in the psyches of these actors as they attempt to reconcile that landscape with their ambition, their insecurity, and their own sense of personhood and responsibility in an industry where how you present to an audience is your primary currency.
This is the kind of play—like most plays that matter are—that forces us to think about our own lives, and so I can’t help but mention another personal resonance: for much of my late elementary school years, I was referred to as Long Duk Dong almost as often as my real name. This leaves scars, of course, but one way to turn those scars into a resultant tougher skin is through finding some healing, redemptive action. Gotanda is not easy on these characters—he shows us their hubris, their hypocrisies and weaknesses and, in a pivotal moment, how their outrageous jealousies can lead to horrifying betrayal. But when the play asks us to empathize, and imagine the psychic toll that these actors are forced to bear, it is a gesture towards redemption. I spent a lot of time wrestling with Long Duk Dong and the stereotypes and caricatures who served as his ancestral forebears; I know what they’ve done to my psyche, but I’ve spent less time considering their impact on the actors who, I can only hope, participated in those travesties with better intentions.
As Bradley says near the end of the play, of a role he’s conflicted about:
I figure once I get there I can change it. I can sit down with the producers and writers and explain the situation. Look, if I don't take it, then what happens? Some other jerk takes it and plays it like some goddamn geek.
Anyone who knows and loves actors has heard something along these lines before, and it’s at least partially noble even when it comes from naivete or insincerity. I’ve had plenty of conversations with actors around the paradox of a craft that requires one to be perpetually and simultaneously thick-skinned and vulnerable, and let me get this out of the way right now: I really, really love actors, maybe more than any other sect of professional colleagues; in sum total, actors have graced me with far more redemptive moments than painful ones, and I owe more debt to the people of that profession than I could ever repay. So I can’t say that I necessarily blame them when they go astray and, for example, ruin my childhood— especially with an understanding of how power works in this business, and how much agency an actor is typically granted in such situations. I can’t necessarily say I don’t blame them either, but I’m sensitive to how that blame works. This summer, for example, in 2023, Miss Saigon is going to be playing in Manchester at the same time as Kimber Lee’s brilliant new untitled f**k m*ss s**gon play, and actors from each could totally end up at a bar together after curtain call. Perhaps there are actors who auditioned for both. Perhaps.
Yankee Dawg You Die works as a history play, but even though it was written over 35 years ago, it works painfully well with a contemporary lens on today’s media landscape. I had lunch with a colleague last week, a brilliant AAPI actor in his 50s who was talking about all the terrific plays he’d seen recently by AAPI writers. He said he felt jealous that those roles weren’t around when he was in his 20s. But he and I have both been around long enough now to know that a moment is just a moment; I hear people talk about how much great film and tv there is featuring AAPI actors about the same amount as I hear about Asian people in legislative or bodily peril, so to read Gotanda’s play now requires vigilance and attention. There is a moment late in the play that shook me:
I have this dream. I am standing in the middle of a room with all these people staring at me. At first I think they are friendly towards me. Then I think, "No, they are evil people out to get me." Then, suddenly again, I think this is exactly where I want to be, it feels wonderful.
As a writer, Gotanda seems to me far more self-aware than his characters are, and this is a moment I’d venture is entirely self-reflective: of his own experience and ambivalence in navigating not just a life in a theater, but in the world. Then again, perhaps I can only read it that way because it feels so familiar. And yet, it goes on:
Then I am seized with a strange fear and I feel I must get the hell out of there. A spotlight flashes on me. I am disoriented. Someone hands me a script. … "Why do I have to do this?" Then this warm, soothing voice says, "Is there a problem, Vincent? All we want you to do is fuck yourself. Take all the time you want.
It’s this question of time that lingers for me.
How much time do we have? How much time will it take?
PHILLIP KAN GOTANDA is a prolific playwright and the author to one of the largest collections of Asian American themed work. He began his career in the late 60s and was a part of the Asian American artist-activist cultural wave. His plays challenge the boundaries and definition of “Asian American Theatre” and include Song of a Nisei Fisherman and Day Standing on its Head. Gotanda’s The Wash was adapted into a Jamaican-American family play titled The Jamaican Wash in collaboration with the Lorraine Hansberry Theater in 2014. It was also adapted into a feature film. Gotanda’s musical, The Avocado Kid or Zen in the Art of Guacamole, which premiered at East West Players in 1979 paved the way for future Asian American musicals. He is also a respected independent filmmaker, songwriter, librettist, and professor.
LLOYD SUH is the author of The Far Country, The Chinese Lady, The Heart Sellers, Bina's Six Apples, Charles Francis Chan Jr's Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, American Hwangap, and others. He has been a recipient of the Steinberg Playwrights Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and the Horton Foote Prize. He was elected in 2016 to the Dramatists Guild Council.
Vincent Chang is a Japanese American actor in his 60s, who has been working steadily for years, taking any part he can get to earn a living and increase Asian American representation onscreen. Bradley Yamashita is a Japanese American actor in his 20s who is in the early stages of his career, trying to carve out an existence for himself in roles that aren’t just stereotypes. Despite appearances, when Vincent and Bradley meet, they find that they have less in common than expected. This lively two-hander explores the industry-wide mistreatment of Asian American actors in film, TV, and theatre, showing how different generations tackle the same, complicated questions about what authentic representation really means.
The world premiere of Yankee Dawg You Die was produced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1988 and moved to Los Angeles Theatre Center shortly after. Playwrights Horizons produced the New York premiere in 1989. It is one of playwright Philip Kan Gotanda’s earlier works.
To read the play: Yankee Dawg You Die Acting Edition by Philip Kan Gotanda