Time’s Journey Through a Room is set one year after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This intimate, multi-layered play observes how hope can spring up alongside sadness and fear, and change can be realized if we are awake to the present moment.
Written by
Toshiki Okada
https://chelfitsch.net/en/
Translated by
Aya Ogawa
Directed by
Dan Rothenberg
Featuring:
Maho Honda
Yuki Kawahisa
Kensaku Shinohara
Set Design:
Anna Kiraly
Costume Design:
Maiko Matsushima
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiki_Okada :
Okada focuses on connecting to his audience's sense of alienation by separating speech and movement in his plays. Okada's hyperrealistic style is often referred to as "super real Japanese," which draws influence from Oriza Hirata's "quiet theater" movement from the 1980s.
His works are distinguished by the use of fragmented and abbreviated idiosyncratic language in the vernacular of Japanese in their twenties, which is deliberately inarticulate, drawn out, and circular.
...
Okada believes that his actors should be able to manipulate their consciousness and balance their attention on both their words and movement. The gap between language and the body is the lived experiences each performer gathers from their environment to bring to their performances, and they use the external body to reflect those lived experiences or "images." Okada advises his actors to not be overly attached with the language or the physicality of the performance so that the audience can interpret the "image," themselves. Actors are one single entity to the image; in addition, Okada uses "the performance's disjointed elements of language, movement, design, music, and more" to signify the "image" in his plays.
