Fourth production in the RooTS series by a young, up-and-coming director lending his modern perspective to a bold new look at a play by a writer from the “underground” generation, a movement considered to be the root of Japanese contemporary theater.

The 1980 masterpiece “The Large Crow (Glass), Even” or “Duchamp’s Glass” by Juichiro Takeuchi (a Japanese pun on “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” by Marcel Duchamp) is being staged by Shuji Onodera of Company Derashinera. In the play, three men are carrying a large plate of glass to a place they are not sure of, and cannot find the entrance to when they arrive. With its surreal and absurd content reminiscent of “Waiting for Godot”, and the pleasure afforded the audience by the physical theater of grown men sweating as they mime the carrying of a plate of glass, Takeuchi’s representative work received great acclaim when it was first staged, and went on to win the Kishida Drama Award. Precisely because the concept is simple, the success or failure of the work depends on the right combination of the three actors, and how they convey meaning through bodily expression. Shuji Onodera was the only choice for this piece as the master of “physical theater”.
This production of the play, which was written as a three-man performance piece, features none other than three highly individual and talented women, Satomi Kobayashi, Hairi Katagiri and Momoko Fujita. This formidable line-up promises some memorable physical theater.