Tea and house: 117 Kyoto townhouse April 29 2013 Two plays were presented by a small company and visiting Hungarian actress at a townhouse near Mibu in Kyoto. The Hungarian Lady Macbeth from Mtensk solo was interesting, but in Hungarian, so it was Greek to me. I concentrate here on the first piece, a “post-dramatic” deconstruction by a trio of amateur actors. When do personal memories become interesting to outsiders? When does an interviewer’s raw material serve as building blocks for a theatre piece? Intuitively, I would think three possibilities: · 1 when speaker is famous enough that even minor incident in their life have meaning towards their known oeuvre; · 2 when the stories add up to a whole portrait, revealing new perspectives on an era or personality; · 3 when there is a disjuncture between what the speaker says and what we know (ala Aunt Lemon by Wallace), so that there is a built-in dramatic tension as we assess the
an occasional document of theatrical life in Kyoto and the virtual world at the beginning of the 21st century