spotlight japan, the final episode
Akio Miyazawa and Jay Scheib (Japan, USA)
Join us for the final presentation of the Segal Center’s Japanese Playwright Project. American Director Jay Scheib will present a reading with excerpts from Akio Miyazawa’s At the Entrance of New Town (Japanese premiere: October 2007). Translated by John K. Gillespie.
At the Entrance of New Town deals with the vast suburbia, developed in the postwar years in Japan, around big cities like Tokyo and Osaka. The space is now considered to be a kind of mythic urban space, where desires and hopes of the middle-class are reflected, refracted or buried. The play also has a connection to the Middle East, referring to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
6:30 p.m., Monday, November 19, 2007, Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!
Akio Miyazawa, born 1956, is a novelist, playwright, director and filmmaker. Miyazawa is one of the leading little theatre figures since the 1990s in Japan. His Yuenchi Saisei Jigyo-dan, a theatre unit that began with the production of Yuenchi Saisei (Regenerating Amusement Park, 1990), kept producing idiosyncratic but basically well-made theatrical works such as Hinemi (’92), which was awarded the prestigious Kishida Playwright’s Award, Chikaku no Niwa (The Garden of Perception, ’95), and Juyonsai no Kuni (The Country of the Fourteen-Year-Old, ’98), and stopped its activity temporarily in 1999, with Suna ni Shizumu Tsuki (The Moon Drowning under the Sand). Miyazawa wrote and directed Tokyo Body (2002-2003). After his ground-breaking experimental work Tokyo/Absence/Hamlet(2005), Miyazawa created Motorcycle Don Quixote, the noh-inspired Nue and At the Entrance of New Town.
Jay Scheib’s recent works include last year’s staging of Argentinean author Daniel Veronese’s Women Dreamt Horses, first presented as a work in progress at the Prelude Festival in New York City followed by its critically acclaimed premier at Performance Space 122 as part of BAiT–Buenos Aires in Translation Festival. He directs in Italy, Germany, Hungary and Slovenia. A recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for directors, Jay Scheib is currently Associate Professor of Music and Theatre Arts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a regular guest professor at the Mozarteum Institute für Regie und Schauspiel in Salzburg Austria. Special thanks to Shoshana Polanco, producer of Jay Scheib’s work.