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Enjoy
Encore Exclusive interview with Enjoy director Dan Rothenberg
Kira Sternbach, left, and Kris Kling in The Play Company’s production of Enjoy, directed by Dan Rothenberg (Photo: Noah Scalin)
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Toshiki Okada’s 2006 play Enjoy will make its English-language premiere at 59E59 Theaters on April 6,2010. Produced by the Play Company and translated by Aya Ogawa, it has been described as a “21st century comedy of manners.” It charts the romantic adventures of young workers at a Tokyo manga café (popular spots in Japan where people pay to read Japanese graphic novels) and takes freedom and emptiness as central themes. Encore caught up with director Dan Rothenberg of Pig Iron Theatre Company fame to get a sense of his vision.
Purposelessness and economic uncertainty are anxieties that run through the play; how does theater explore these themes in a way that other arts can’t?
Toshiki Okada’s work is all about how we imagine other people imagining us. A lot of his formal moves involve one character quoting another character, and then the quote becomes so long that the actor becomes the person he was quoting. So, the very same capacity that allows us to make theater—our theory of mind, our ability to imagine what other people think—is a kind of weapon of self-destruction in Okada’s work. The characters enact imaginary others berating them, belittling them. One of the characters says that how other people see you is a real thing with real, physical presence. Theater is the only medium where we can show just how real those imaginary oppressors can become.
The relationship between labor and freedom is a central one in Enjoy. How do you think American audiences will view this theme?
In his production, Okada screened video of the French protestors who opposed the cutting of social benefits. He wanted to underline, he told me, his feeling that Japanese citizens were too complacent about their “place” in Japanese society. He thought Japanese citizens would never protest economic conditions. We’re even more complacent about our social benefits (or lack of them) here in the States. But the thing about Enjoy is that it manages to put these issues not in a policy context but where most of us feel them, embedded in the minutiae of our everyday actions. Most people don’t care about the unemployment rate, but most people feel keenly how much money their neighbors have compared to them. And we have many rarely-spoken and powerfully-held notions about what is normal when it comes to employment. The first hour of Enjoy is almost exclusively about how old someone can be and still have a part-time job. I think most Americans will be able to say at what age they firmly believe someone “should” have a full-time job.
What’s your favorite scene in the play and why?
I love the part where Maeno begins doing an impression of her boyfriend, Mizuno, and how pathetic his complaints are. She lists all the complaints, implying how stupid and self-serious Mizuno is, but slowly and subtly the “impression” becomes an “embodiment,” and you in the audience start to vibrate between wondering if the complaints are stupid or deeply felt and real.
There’s an interesting dynamic in juxtaposing the intensely visual connotations of the manga cafe, which immediately localizes the audience into a Japanese environment, and the fact that the characters will be speaking in English. How will you convey (and even exploit) this dynamic on stage?
Early on, the producers and I decided we didn’t want to cast all Japanese-looking actors; that seems like such a dated and clunky way to “set the scene.” And since there are no character names, just “Actor 1” and “Actor 2,” some actors blur the lines between characters…the script just begs us to underline the fact that these roles are ”put on.” So the setting in Japan is just as put-on as the characters, and the scene is set very casually, with language, just the actors dropping the information: “Okay, imagine you’re in this manga cafe, and the counter is over here, and the register is here.” I’m relying a lot on Aya Ogawa’s brilliant translation of the material to create a feeling of “where” and “us.” She’s done an incredible rendition of a very rich, very young contemporary English to mirror Okada’s “super-realistic Japanese.” I think the cadences and turns of phrase are going to make these characters feel very familiar to an American audience.
What was it like working with Toshiki Okada?
I’m a big fan. Okada works in a very narrow vein and he he has a distinct choreographic style. Aya and I visited him in Japan and saw him work with his actors. But in talking to him about the American premiere, he was completely open to new ideas. He said, “Go ahead and change whatever you want.” He and I share a distrust of the value of being “faithful” to a script. So I’ve actually kept him pretty far from preparations for this production; he’ll see a preview and we’ll discuss that. The funny thing is that I’ve changed less than five percent of the script. In working the script, I started to fall in love with the deep math of when characters enter and exit, and it seemed like a terrible idea to change that rhythm.
Enjoy will be presented in Theater B of 59E59 Theaters March 27—April 25. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit 59e59.org or playco.org.