Tuesday, May 27, 2025
As one waits, seated, for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s world-premiere production of “Akira Kurosawa Explains His Movies and Yogurt (With Live & Active Cultures!)” to begin, stills from Kurosawa films loop on a large screen to an orchestral soundtrack.
One seems to be in an art-house cinema, about to see one of the acclaimed director’s classic films, perhaps “Rashomon” or “Seven Samurai.” But no. Playwright Julia Izumi comes out to introduce an in-person talk by Kurosawa at a lectern at the left front of the stage.
The thing is, Kurosawa died in 1998, outliving by decades the two other legendary directors of Japanese cinema’s Golden Age: Kenji Mizoguchi, who died in 1956, and Yasujiro Ozu, in 1963. Nonetheless, “Kurosawa,” wearing his trademark cap and sunglasses — he was said to be imitating American director of Westerns John Ford, an early inspiration — enters (applause) and begins to speak, in Japanese.
“A translator will be with us shortly,” the audience is told, and Murphy’s Law takes over, sending the event staff into a tizzy. There are second and third takes, with ever more elaborate introductory slides. Next, we are treated to a video tribute by Steven Spielberg and a vintage TV commercial for Dannon yogurt on a small lowered screen.
Each member of Izumi’s frantic, sometimes rebellious troupe (“Why are you writing a play about someone when you don’t care about their work?”) — Jamar Jones, Ashil Lee, Lizzy Lewis, Kento Morita and Jihan Haddad — takes center stage in this stop-and-start Kurosawa-themed exploration of identity, storytelling, loss, guilt and language (and, yes, yogurt). Director Aileen Wen McGroddy has been involved with the show from the beginning, directing it in workshop form at a 2018 festival at Brown University.
Izumi, who earned an MFA in writing for performance at Brown after getting a B.A. in drama at Tufts University, has quite a number of credits for a young playwright, several concerning Japanese who made a name outside Japan.
In “Meet Murasaki Shikibu Followed by Book Signing, and Other Things,” which premiered at the New York Fringe Festival in 2016, Izumi played the author of “The Tale of Genji,” an 11th-century work sometimes called the world’s first novel. Last February at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she and another playwright-performer, Aya Ogawa, portrayed 20th-century Japanese American painters Bumpei Usui and Yasuo Kuniyoshi in the spirit of manzai, a Japanese straight-man/funny-man act.
Making contemporary fun of revered cultural figures is not only entertaining but cathartic for performers and audience members alike, a type of sly (if not outright disrespectful) comedy rooted in Italian commedia dell’arte and, later, Punch and Judy.
“Akira Kurosawa Explains…” often feels like sketch comedy or improv, with (spoilers): a uke tune sung by Lee; two kooky disco numbers, one about how to pronounce Fage; a Lactobacillus rap; and a trio of fur coat-wearing Giuliana Stramigiolis speaking in unison with thick Italian accents. (Mostly played, delightfully, by Lewis, Stramigioli was a Japanologist who recommended that “Rashomon” be shown at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize.)
But in this extended riff on Kurosawa, co-produced by New Georges, a company near New York’s South Street Seaport, Izumi goes beyond these broad satiric modes in two ways.
First, it is deeply personal. As she recounts in a 2023 Playwrights Horizons interview: “Between November 2017 and November 2018, five people from different parts of my life died.” Thus, the play took on a strong undercurrent of loss, grief and guilt, which is gradually revealed, first in relation to the death of Kurosawa’s brother, then in relation to the death of Izumi’s mother’s brother.
Izumi’s identity as a first-generation Japanese American, which she links to the caught-between-two-cultures films of Kurosawa, comes movingly to the surface in references to psychological and language barriers (“There’s no word for ‘miss’ in Japanese”).
The yogurt jokes are personal, too. Also from the Playwrights Horizons interview: “After the third death, I was diagnosed with severe acid reflux, a condition known as GERD. I had to stop eating anything acidic — tomatoes, garlic, chocolate, onions, anything greasy or fried or spicy, etc. So all of my favorite comfort foods were taken away.” The remedy? Lots and lots of yogurt.
Second, the play makes remarkably effective use of what has been termed “live cinema”: shooting video of the in-person action and projecting it in real time, a technique pioneered by British director Katie Mitchell. Usually showing the young Kurosawa, played by Izumi, and Heigo, his brother and mentor, in black-and-white on the big screen, these sequences are “dubbed” in Japanese (spoken by Morita off to the side) and subtitled in English. Video and projection designer Patrick W. Lord and sound designer Tosin Olufolabi outdid themselves.
What could be more appropriate to tell the story of a film director than “live cinema”? What’s more, Heigo worked as a benshi, a narrator of silent cinema, a profession that melted away with the arrival of the talkies. And silent cinema’s convention of projected narration and dialogue, known as intertitles, is amusingly toyed with, with AI overtones.
Though the live cinema steals the show, the sets and costumes, designed by Sonia Fernandez and Camilla Dely, respectively, contributed to the pleasingly disorienting liveliness. I hope Dely got a deal on the caps for the many “Kurosawas.”
Akira Kurosawa Explains His Movies and Yogurt (With Live & Active Cultures!)
Through June 1
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D St. NW
woollymammoth.net