Theatre in the Present Tense: A Fist of Roses

“I could never do it now, because it’s too controversial.”

-Philip Kan Gotanda on his play, A Fist of Roses

When anyone asks me what’s the best horror movie I’ve ever seen (and no one has, but if they did), I would say, “4 months, 3 weeks 2 days.” This is not strictly a horror film, but it’s probably the most horrific film I’ve seen. It’s a Romanian film about a young woman who goes to great lengths to obtain an illegal abortion. Although it’s not a documentary, it’s presented in a documentary style. And it’s chilling. Because it’s completely plausible.

In the same vein is Philip Kan Gotanda’s remarkable A Fist of Roses, a shattering play about domestic violence, which Gotanda directed as well as wrote, and which premiered in 2004. I don’t want to say that there is nothing more powerful than real life on stage. But real life has its own kind of power that lives in its own dramatic universe.

The author of nearly 30 plays, Gotanda is one of America’s most prolific playwrights, creating one of the largest canons of work exploring the Asian experience. In his works, he has chronicled Japanese America from the early 20th Century to the present day.

Gotanda wrote and co-created this play with members of Campo Santo Theatre, an award-winning multi-cultural ensemble in San Francisco, committed to developing and premiering new performances and theatre.

Gotanda said, “One of the things that I admired is that Campo Santo was one of the first small theatre companies that was multi-racial. And it didn’t feel like it was imposed in any way. It simply was. And they were doing interesting theatre, all world premieres.”

Campo Santo had just done one of Gotanda’s other plays and one of the co-founders, Sean San José, asked if he wanted to collaborate on something new. Stories of violence against women had ignited the news at the time and were at the forefront of Gotanda’s attention. That would be a worthwhile project, he thought, if there was a way to do it. The resulting piece was A Fist of Roses, one of the most devastating plays I’ve ever seen.

In A Fist of Roses, five performers play both men and women in a series of scenes about domestic violence. These are scenes of psychological abuse, sexual domination, gaslighting, and outright brutality.

Oh, and the cast? They were all men.

This bold casting decision, for me, was what gave the piece its singular power. The men were dressed as men and, without changing costumes, played both male perpetrators and female victims throughout many scenes.

There was no elaborate set, just a few chairs, which allowed the actors to move fluidly from one scene to the next.

The cast contained actors of varying backgrounds: two black actors, (one an activist and one a beat boxer), a Chinese American actor, a white actor and a South Asian actor. And issues of race wove their way into the fabric of the play.

Having only male actors gave the piece a strange and powerful quality. It called to mind inmates in a maximum-security prison enacting these scenes. It was as if the reliving of their transgressions and crimes - as well as portraying their victims - was a path to responsibility, atonement and redemption.

Without knowing it at the time, I later came to discover that this resonance was present in its source. The wellspring of this play was a San Francisco organization called Man Alive. Gotanda says that Man Alive was a social program with “a group of men who would meet weekly, all of whom were convicted of some crime involving violence against women. If you were convicted, and it didn’t reach a certain level of severity, you were given a choice – either go to jail or attend these meetings.”

This was like a twelve-step program or group therapy session for domestic abusers. Gotanda was allowed to record the sessions over a period of many months. Although there was other research which Gotanda did, he said, “this source of information became the one that was most compelling to me.” And it became the bedrock of the play.

The words of the men were transcribed and this text became the raw material for the script. The choreography and physical flow were choreographer Erika Chong Shuch's invaluable contributions. One song was from the 1960s girl group The Crystals called “He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss.” This is an extraordinary song portraying, without irony, the mindset of an abused woman. Another song was the seemingly more mainstream song “My Girl” by The Temptations. “My Girl” was performed by the actors and started as a funny, hokey song-and-dance number. But it slowly transformed from the benign song we all know to an increasing hostile take on the lyrics: My girl. My girl. MY girl! As Robert Hurtwitt observed in his San Francisco Chronicle review, “It may be impossible ever to hear the number again without thinking of the brutality that can be implicit in that possessive pronoun.”

There was a general unease as each scene started, because there was no way of knowing where it would end up, but it was clear that scenes would not end well.

Michael Cheng, Donald E. Lacy jr., and Danny Wolohan
Photo courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle / Photo by Kat Wade

There was a very simple scene in which a man said I love you to his woman, and would not accept any response except “I love you too.” Those four words, in that order. When she told him that she loved him in any other way, even saying back to him “I love you,” it was not acceptable. It needed to be “I love you too.” The man kept demanding the she say it that way he wanted it. This kind of power dynamic was extremely unsettling as it played out.

There was also an interactive part of the performance:

“I wanted to have the audience involved in some way” Gotanda said, “but involved in a way that was a little more dangerous.”

The cast handed out cards before the show began and asked the audience to write out – only if they wanted to - an incident of violence that they themselves had witnessed or experienced. If they handed them in they understood that what they wrote anonymously might be read aloud.

At the end of the play, the cards were collected was brought on stage and each cast member took a card at random. These were the real incidents of violence which someone in our very room had experienced. And the actors read them one by one.

When I saw the play, these readings suddenly moved the frame from the stage to the entire auditorium in one electrifying, emotional jolt. We listened to this testimony in silence and the actors brought the play to a close.

Gotanda wonders if the play would be too provocative now.

“The times change, the way you look at work changes and that’s rightfully so. It’s a piece I can’t do any more. Live theatre has such an impact because it speaks in the present tense. That is why it worked the way it worked. A piece that deals so much with contemporary issues that are shifting continuously, race and gender issues. It very difficult to find again that present tense experience of it.”

He adds: “It got a really strong response. A very, very intense response. I think the strongest of any piece I’ve ever done. And it was never done again.”