Words, music and the history of the world collide next week with the new theatrical presentation of Tokio Confidential at Atlantic Theater Stage 2 from Feb. 5-19 and Our Planet at Japan Society for one night only on Feb. 6.
A new musical penned entirely by Eric Schorr and helmed by Joanna McKeon (the associate director of the Broadway and national tour editions of Green Day’s American Idiot), Tokio Confidential (a Richard Rogers Award finalist) is set in 1879 the hidden pleasure quarters of Meiji era Japan.
Isabella Archer, a young American war widow, crosses an ocean in search of a lost love—and is about to cross a line from which she can never return. When Isabella falls in love with a renowned Japanese tattoo artist, she enters a world of extreme beauty, becoming an object of unexpected desire—in a realm of unspeakable danger. It’s a journey across the boundaries between pleasure and pain, art and artifice, the secrets of the flesh and the sins of the heart.
Making its debut following its 2011 Actors Studio reading, the cast of Tokio Confidential includes Jeff Kready (Billy Elliot), Austin Ku (The King and I), Mel Maghuyop (Miss Saigon), Benjamin McHugh (Mamma Mia!), Manna Nichols (The King and I), Mike O'Carroll (Mary Poppins), and Jill Paice (Curtains).
As part of Japan Society’s Performing Arts Season, OBIE Award-winning director Alec Duffy will lead a staged reading of young Japanese phenom Yukio Shiba’s Our Planet on Feb. 6. As part of Japan Society’s annual Play Reading Series (now in its seventh year), the work is an rumination in which the minutia of an average Japanese family’s everyday life is juxtaposed with galactic events of the Earth’s birth and death. Inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Shiba’s Our Planet (Wagahoshi) won the prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2010.
“With Our Planet, Yukio Shiba force-feeds the audience giant perspective—pulling us out, out, out, until we are circling our own lives on Earth,” says Duffy. The audience is swept up and buckled down in a thrilling blur of time and space, visiting lives on Earth and imagining alternatives to those lives—fast forwarding, rewinding, jumping through millennia and also settling in for birthday cake around the kitchen table.”
A member of the directing department of the Seinendan theater company, Shiba’s works for this company are characterized by subtleties of the seemingly unexceptional happenings of everyday life expressed in carefully selected words and then brought to stage with concepts from non-theatrical sources like audio loops and samplings.
“Shiba is a playwright with a ferocious imagination,” Duffy continues. “He bursts our world, eschewing all rules of time and space, and in the process brings new insight into human habits and foibles. He's a thrilling young playwright from whom I anticipate great things.”
Whether it’s a vision of the past or a reflection of the future, next week promises a world of possibilities in cross-cultural theatrical expressions.
Tokio Confidential runs from Feb. 5-19 at the Atlantic Theater Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues). Tickets are $45. For tickets and showtimes, visit www.tokioconfidential.com.
Our Planet will be held Feb. 6 at 7:30 p.m. at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street (between First and Second Avenues). Tickets are $10/$8 Japan Society members. For more information, click here.
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