Philip Kan Gotanda spent more than four decades as a filmmaker and playwright before he decided to try storytelling in a new format: opera. Gotanda, whose work focuses primarily on the Japanese American experience and World War II, was feeling creatively blocked; he was looking for a new approach to his work. With the help of a composer (Max Giteck Duykers) and a director (Melissa Weaver), Gotanda took on the role of librettist for his first experimental opera, Both Eyes Open.
The opera follows the stories of Jinzo Matsumoto, a fictional Japanese American farmer from Stockton, and his wife, Catherine, as they endure incarceration and the loss of their farmland. An impressionistic, experimental production, Both Eyes Open uses projections, interactive video elements and a unique instrument called the Marimba Lumina to set its scenes.
Creating the work was a collaborative effort of herculean scale: it took Gotanda and his colleagues a full decade to complete Both Eyes Open. It debuted in 2022 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco and plays for two days only this weekend at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Playhouse.
“The idea was that the story would … be relevant to the times,” says Gotanda. “It creates a through line, showing the reasons behind the original incarceration are very much related to all the anti-immigrant, anti-Asian hatred that’s going on now.”
Hatred, says Gotanda, is part of the soil in Both Eyes Open, just like it was back in the early 1900s for other immigrants. He points to George Shima as an example, the real-life Japanese American immigrant businessman whose success growing potatoes in the drained swampland of the San Joaquin Delta was cut short by government-sanctioned racism.
