The Wash
by Philip Kan Gotanda

Name: The Wash
Brand: Philip Kan Gotanda
SKU: 9780822212225
Rating: 3.79 (53 reviews)

Highlights

Medium Cast

Female

Male

90 mins Unit Set/Multiple Settings American

Synopsis

By the author of Yankee Dawg You Die, The Wash examines the slow and painful death of a marriage after 42 years.

Masi Matsumoto has been separated from her husband, Nobu, for more than a year, but she still returns weekly to pick up and deliver his laundry, while Nobu refuses to believe their marriage is over.

One daughter hopes for reconciliation; the other estranged from her father since her marriage to a black man, encourages her mother's move towards freedom.

Nobu is engaged in a growing friendship with restaurant owner Kiyoko, but when he discovers that Masi has tentatively begun a relationship with another man, Sadao, Nobu's pride is battered, and he becomes reclusive and obstinate.

Finally, Masi asks Nobu for a divorce, and at the end of the play, Nobu is alone trying to figure out what his life has become, and how to restore relationships with his daughters.

Press Reviews

"Philip Kan Gotanda is the winner of the 2020 Legacy Playwrights Initiative Award. Tradition collides with the ever-changing landscape of contemporary American culture when a Japanese-American marriage of 42 years dissolves, leaving a husband and wife torn between what their Japanese upbringing demands of them and the happiness their American sense of self-fulfillment urges them to pursue. ”…Gotanda's extremely simple and sensitive play captures most of the ludicrous aspects and bitter failures two people feel at the dissolution of a marriage…“ —Drama-Logue. ”There is a quietude and even a fragility about many of the scenes…a play that is small in scale but has broader relevance for families, especially Asian-Americans."
— The New York Times