By Juliana Kiyan
Tony Award winner Frank Galati brings two of Haruki Murakami's short stories to life in the production of "after the quake," a story-within-a-story starring Hanson Tse, Keong Sim, Jennifer Shin and Paul H. Juhn.
The six stories in Haruki Murakami's after the quake are all set in February of 1995, the quiet month between the disastrous Kobe earthquake and the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. Murakami chronicles the deeply emotional reactions of his ordinary and utterly familiar characters, as their country staggers from one tragedy and unknowingly toward another.
Director Frank Galati has interwoven the last two stories of Murakami's 2002 collection to create a spellbinding 90-minute one act play -- named after the book -- which is now showing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. "Each of these stories is a meditation upon that feeling when one's whole world has collapsed into uncertain," Galati, a Steppenwolf member and Tony Award winner, told The San Diego Tribune.
The play combines "honey pie" and "super-frog saves tokyo" as a story-within-a-story, with the four actors playing multiple roles within the play. Junpei (Hanson Tse), the sweet and timid writer of "honey pie," lulls young Sala (played alternately by 9-year-old Madison Logan V. Phan and 6-year-old Gemma Megumi Fa-Kaji) to sleep by telling her a story about a bear who sells honey. Sala has been plagued with nightmares after watching coverage of the earthquake non-stop, and her mother, Sayoko (Jennifer Shin), knows that only Junpei's enchanting stories can calm her down.
Actor Keong Sim narrates the story of Junpei and Sayoko, who, along with Sayoko's husband Takatsuki (Paul H. Juhn), have been best friends since college. For just as long, Junpei has been in love with Sayoko, only to passively watch her get married to and have a child with Takatsuki, a self-confident newspaper reporter. Despite harboring a deep-seated love for Sayoko, Junpei still serves as a surrogate father to Sala. Her nightmares inspire his next story, "super-frog saves tokyo."
With the incorporation of the second story, Tse turns into the narrator, telling the fantastical tale of a giant frog (Sim) that visits Katagiri (Juhn), an ordinary collections officer with no social or sentimental life, to enlist his help in preventing another earthquake from striking Tokyo.
Katagiri is a beaten-down everyman who is baffled at the extraordinary chance to become a hero. Frog is a larger-than-life character that may or may not exist solely in the mind of Katagiri. While Murakami describes the Frog as a six-foot tall creature with "the limbs and movements of a real frog," Sim's Frog is readily believable dressed in a suit sporting green gloves and rose-colored glasses.
"It's a fun role that also asks the audience to take a leap of faith, since I'm just wearing these gloves and green socks," says Sim. "I'm not acting tremendously like a frog." Indeed, his is a frog that is well-mannered and plainspoken and enjoys a cup of tea. He is also very erudite, quoting everyone from Dostoevsky to Hemingway to Conrad to make a point.
The two narratives unfold on a nearly-bare thrust stage as the characters are forced to re-evaluate their lives after the quake.
"[In an earthquake,] the earth really shifts and has to readjust, and it's the same with our lives," says Tse. "We're living beings, something has to eventually give and we move forward."
For Junpei in particular, the quake becomes a catalyst for change. After Sayoko and Takatsuki divorce, and even after she makes her feelings for Junpei clear, Junpei still equivocates on confessing his love. However, the earthquake fundamentally jolts his perspective on life, and he finally grasps at the chance to become a real part of Sayoko and Sala's family.
Live music -- with Jason McDermott on the cello and Jeff Wichmann on the koto (a Japanese string instrument) -- punctuate the dialogue and action. The score's quotations from Schubert and the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" (also the title of Murakami's highly popular 1987 novel) inform a heightened and emotional atmosphere. "The way the play is set up, the music is definitely the sixth player," says Sim.
In a flashback scene where Takatsuki bluntly informs Junpei of his love for Sayoko, the opening bars of "Norwegian Wood" intersperse with the dialogue and make the moment all the more heartbreaking for Junpei. The audience can practically hear Lennon lament "I once had a girl / Or should I say, she once had me," as Junpei resigns to love lost. The music is related to Junpei and Sayoko's relationship, but Tse says, "I also think it was partially done as an homage to Murakami's past works."
Murakami is known for his appreciation of music and musical forms, especially jazz and rock. In an essay Murakami wrote last summer for The New York Times, he says that long before he even considered being a novelist, he worked in the music business and owned a jazz club in Tokyo. His musical sensibilities are apparent in several of his works, and he says now that "Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist."
Storytelling and surviving
While Galati has remained faithful to the original text (much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from the two stories), a powerful new element emerges where "honey pie" and "super-frog saves tokyo" intersect. Through Junpei's stories, the play highlights the healing powers of storytelling in the wake of tragedy.
The Kobe earthquake was a shock to the system, to say the least. Located in western Japan, a seemingly safe distance from the fault lines, Kobe was struck by an earthquake early one morning that killed more than 4,000 people and dislocated nearly 300,000. As the characters onstage come to terms with the randomness of a natural catastrophe, their grief and fears are bound to resonate with American audiences in light of recent national tragedies such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the California fires. The audience witnesses the characters' emotional aftershocks and how they move forward and reconnect.
"The play works on two levels," says Sim. "There are the cataclysmic and physical earthquakes, and then there are, more importantly, the internal earthquakes. [The play] is very universal — we each have our own crises and earthquakes we have to deal with internally."
In the play, storytelling becomes a method of healing those internal earthquakes. By telling Sala the story of the honey bear, Junpei soothes her nerves, and at the same time realizes the need to settle his own. "Junpei uses the story as his mechanism for finding a new equilibrium," says Tse. "That's where he dreams of what could be in his life. And he realizes he can actually try to make his dreams his actual reality."
In "super-frog saves tokyo," storytelling serves to reassure Katagiri of his value in the world. "Katagiri, who is this lonely shadow of [a] person that doesn't take up too much space — the loser everyman whom most can relate to at some point — needs to have Frog show up and recognize him, unlike his family, and acknowledge what he's done," says Sim. Having someone (in this case, Frog) be able to relate his life story helps Katagiri survive.
Stories can help make sense of the devastating feeling of helplessness in light of a natural disaster. While Junpei cannot alleviate his countrymen's suffering, he can teach Sala — and himself — how to face fear. "Having actors tell the stories and put those experiences in words is a way of owning it and a way of being therapeutic," says Sim.
In the end of the play, Junpei is awake and alert while Sayoko and Sala sleep nearby. He resolves to "write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far. I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love."
The play has come to the Berkeley Repertory following two years of acclaimed performances in Chicago, New Haven, Connecticut and La Jolla, California.
Tse and Sim of the original cast join Shin and Juhn for the Berkeley performances.
"After doing two hundred shows together, to then throw in two new people, it inherently infuses the play with a new energy and perspectives," says Sim. "[Shin and Juhn] are different people and different artists, with different sensibilities, and they were able to jump right in."
Currently in the middle of its run and boasting strong ticket sales, Tse and Sim feel like the play has found its true home. "People here are hungry for this material," says Tse. "There is an audience here for Murakami and this type of work."
after the quake is playing through Nov. 25 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison Street, Berkeley. For tickets, call (510) 647-2949 or visit here.
Published: Friday, November 2, 2007
