Ballad of Yachiyo Author:Philip Kan Gotanda Based on a chapter from his own family's history, Philip Kan Gotanda's play is set among Asian (mainly Japanese) workers at a Hawaiian sugar cane plantation in the early 1900s. The drama uses delicate poetic language to tell the story of a young girl's sexual awakening, and what that comes to mean for her own life, and the position o... more »f her family within the era's rigid social system. In some ways Gotanda uses language as lusciously as Tennessee Williams did in his golden age--and to tell a similar story of passions erupting below what seems to be a placid surface.« less