■Details:
This performance of an extremely well-known work of modern American drama by people with physical disabilities pursues our own reality through its gutsy casting. The play has four main characters: Laura, who has a limp, her mother Amanda, her brother Tom, always anxious about his sister, and Jim, the gentlemanly acquaintance who joins them one evening.
In this production, Laura is played by an 18-year old wheelchair-using actor with muscular dystrophy. Scene 1 is presented in workshop format with a variety of performers on stage, but as the narrative progresses the event transforms into theater, with the mother Amanda played by an actress in her 70s,and the part of the brother Tom taken by the 50-something actress-facilitator.
Both actresses play the one role of Jim for the last scene, a device that serves to represent Jim’s multi-faceted charm. The play ends with the wheelchair-bound Laura broken-hearted by the two-woman Jim.

■Overview:
Going forward, we would like to go to citizen-led theater groups and NPOs across Japan as well as communities such as welfare facility workplaces, and stage workshop-style shows known as workshop productions together with the people that work in those places.
Our belief is that this will increase interest in theater and strengthen lateral communication among local communities, consequently serving as a platform for diverse people to jointly find the meaning of living.

■Performances:
Members of Shure University’s Nan Ari project, Yasuko Yamaguchi, Junko Kurashina, Kei Hirota