CCSF Theatre Arts presents
After The War Blues
May 10-12 2024
on Z Space’s Steindler Stage
1948. San Francisco’s Fillmore District, to some the "Harlem of the West", to others “Japanese Town”. Racial tensions simmer, love triangles soar, and the wrecking ball looms as each community feels the weight of the past and the pressure of an uncertain future.
In this rich, poetic play, the newly arrived African-American and recently interned Japanese-American communities jostle shoulder to shoulder in the boarding houses and on the unemployment lines. Young lovers find each other on the dance floors and in the bedrooms of a 1948 boarding house. The play is full of the jazz and swing music of San Francisco’s post war blues.
The city-scape of this play is a familiar map. Geary Boulevard, the living scar of eminent domain seizure of two thriving neighborhoods in one, The Fillmore and Japanese Town. However, the stories of communities of marginalized people who were displaced still resonate today and need to be told by this passionate young and diverse performing company from CCSF Theatre Arts.
About Philip Kan Gotanda
Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda has been a major influence in broadening how theater has been defined in America. Through his plays and advocacy, Gotanda has been instrumental in bringing stories of Asians in the United States to mainstream American theater as well as to Europe and Asia. The author of one of the largest canon of Asian American-themed work, Gotanda is a seminal figure in the field of Asian American Drama. Philip Kan Gotanda’s plays are studied and performed extensively at universities, colleges and learning institutions in the United States and abroad.
