AFTER THE QUAKE

Haruki Murakami brought to life

By JONATHAN DONALDSON

del.ico.us | digg it! | reddit!

print | email | 0 Comments

While the Kobe earthquake and Sarin gas attacks were occurring in his native Japan in 1995, writer Haruki Murakami was teaching at Tufts, watching the disasters unfold from a television. But rather than sit on his ass and surf the internet like most of us do following national disasters, he returned to Japan, conducted interviews and wrote two books.

After the Quake (2000) features six short stories related to the Kobe disaster in which the author explores his feelings of detachment from the tragedies. Two of the shorts, "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" and "Honey Pie," were since adapted by Tony Award-winner Frank Galati into this brilliant stage production, which delicately weaves Murakami's distinct tales into a single story of great love, great ordinariness and great fear.

"One of the reasons why I chose the script is that it's weird in all the right ways," says Shawn LaCount, director of Company One's production of After the Quake, opening this week at the Boston Center for the Arts. "Everyday, young, normal people are his heroes in these extraordinary situations. He balances the mundane and the existential in a way that keeps you on your toes and, I think, laughing and touched at the same time."

After the Quake tells the story of Junpei, the classic idiot/saint archetype who we encounter telling bedtime stories to a young girl suffering from nightmares—after seeing images of the earthquake on television. This girl is the child of the woman Junpei has secretly loved for his entire adult life, and his best friend/archrival. Intertwined with Junpei's bedtime stories are the stories of this love triangle as we move back in time, and the related but separate story of a giant frog that appears to a lonely businessman seeking help in saving Tokyo from a horrible earthquake. Galati's adaptation combines the devices of magical realism (abrupt shifts back and forth through time, shifts of narrative tone, magic without explanation) with Murakami's innate storytelling ability and insatiable literary palate, to create a play with great universal appeal and musical synchronicity. Says LaCount, "I think what is so beautifully manipulative about Murakami is that he does this in a way that, though poetic at times, is also very matter of fact. He doesn't run away from cliché."

"It became an awakening. That's what Murakami's work is like," says Michael Tow—who plays the roles of both the Narrator and the Frog in the five-person ensemble (seven if you include the two onstage musicians). Most characters oscillate back and forth between two contrasting roles for the duration of the play. Says Tow, "You see Katagiri [the lonely businessman] switching into Takatsuki [the rival]—these are two majorly different types of personalities—a really nerdy guy [into] a really outgoing guy. As an actor, you're constantly keeping an eye on which character you're in, what age you are, what part of the story you're in. There's no middle ground."

Murakami's work is magic. By hooking us with an emotional epicenter that we can all understand—our very personal fears and avoidance of true love—he guides us into the murkiness of our less-explored fears and avoidance of humanity. "I hope that people leave the play not 100-percent clear what the lesson is," says LaCount, pausing. "Don't wait for the world to crumble and shatter to realize all the opportunities that lie at your feet."

AFTER THE QUAKE

WRITTEN BY HARUKI MURAKAMIADAPTED FOR STAGE BY FRANK GALATI

OPENS FRIDAY 7.17.09

UNTIL SATURDAY 8.15.09

BOSTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS

PLAZA THEATRE

539 TREMONT ST.

BOSTON

617.426.5000

WED-THU 7:30PM

FRI-SAT 8PM

SUN 2:00PM

$15-$38

PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN

PERFORMANCE

SUNDAY 7.19.09 (MINIMUM $6)

BOX-OFFICE ONLY

TICKETS ON SALE AT NOON

BCAONLINE.ORG