UC Berkeley has been fortunate enough to have great American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda as a professor in its Theater, Dance and Performance Studies (TDPS) program, and sometimes that comes out in some exciting shows in the department’s main stage performance season.
The program is reviving “the Dream of Kitamura,” an early experimental play of Gotanda’s that San Francisco’s Asian American Theater Company premiered way back in 1981, directed by fellow Asian American theater pioneer David Henry Hwang.
The play is a nonlinear, image-strewn hallucinatory dreamscape appropriate to its subject of the desperate measures a lord when he dreams that a demon is going to kill him.
It blends influence as diverse as Butoh and the Three Stooges, martial arts movies, Spaghetti Westerns and Gagaku, traditional Japanese imperial court music. Reimagining this early material after several decades, Gotanda is now directing the play himself in collaboration with choreographer Katie Faulkner and a diverse student cast.
Details: Through April 29; Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley; $13-$20; tdps.berkeley.edu