THE STORY: Harry Kitamura, a successful law professor, begins to find his life unraveling when he starts researching a paper about his involvement in a campus strike in the early 1970s. Odd characters with violent and overt sexual impulses begin to invade his night dreams, eventually spilling over into his waking life. Soon he is unable to distinguish between the two worlds, sending him on an uncontrollable ride of obsession and ultimate revelation. The 1960s, the Red Guard, Eric Clapton and a Japanese Peggy Lee impersonator all make their presences known in this tale of a heart lost and a heart found.
Philip Kan Gotanda is the winner of the 2020 Legacy Playwrights Initiative Award.
Reality mixes with the past to arouse and comfort a man going through the crises of entering middle age.
“Philip Kan Gotanda’s DAY STANDING ON ITS HEAD is a wonder…It’s a beautiful piece of theater…Gotanda has strung his elements together with imagination, grace and sensitivity…he imparts such a fresh, buoyant and humorous touch to the work that it shines with a poignant loveliness, like an array of Japanese lanterns glowing against a dark blue sky.” —Oakland Tribune.
“…a journey as witty and engaging as it is indirect…elements of fantasy and reality and life and death become tangled in tantalizing ambiguity.” —San Francisco Examiner.
