Ensemble play with 10+ characters, men and women.

Originally written in Japanese by Mikuni Yanaihara. Co-translation with Kameron Steele.

Set in an unnamed time and place somewhere in a deep forest. It is a world where birds have become extinct and people have stopped looking at the sky. Seven scholars received a mission from the govenment to search for the “blue bird,” the last of the species, and let it multiply. The blue bird flies only at those brief moments when the night becomes the morning. The scholars each specializing in mammals, insects, plants and birds walk around the forest during the “blue” hours, expressing their own views about the extinction of the species. Days pass in vain, until one day, they look up at the sky…
 

English language premiere produced by Witness Relocation at Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, directed by Dan Safer in 2009.

6 men, 4 women

From acclaimed Japanese director/playwright Toshiki Okada, Artistic Director of the internationally-lauded chelfitsch Theatre Company, comes a chronicle of post-college ennui and 21st Century relationships in Japan's Lost Generation. The static lives of several self-obsessed GenX comic book store clerks are thrown out of balance by the presence of a younger female co-worker, who rightly makes them question the meaning of their lives in a shifting socio-economic landscape. Written in the hyper-colloquial style Okada has become famous for, this play met with massive critical praise upon its New York premiere.

Purchase Enjoy HERE through Samuel French.

English language premiere produced by the Play Company at 59E59 Theaters in 2010, directed by Dan Rothenberg.

Press:

Mr. Okada, with the help of a very deft translation by Aya Ogawa, makes sure that even if it take a while to communicate a thought, a mood of indulgence and despair emerges clearly. -- The New York Times [read original article]

Kudos for the offhanded brilliance of the transposed idiom in Enjoy goes to New York–based playwright Aya Ogawa, whose translation is fluid and delicious.  -- American Theatre Magazine [read original article]

Aya Ogawa’s effortless, idiomatic translation (surely the process of rabbinical focus)... -- Time Out New York [read original article]

Although it maintains its otherness, the beautiful translation by Aya Ogawa makes effective use of American colloquialisms and rings utterly true. -- Theatre Is Easy [read original article]

What Okada is getting at – and what Ogawa and Rothenberg capture so well – is the poetry of the inarticulate. The language in the show is like a hyperreal poetics in which characters careen in and out of interior monologue, into dialogue, into exposition and back again. The characters are struggling to express themselves and interpret the interplay between their inner lives and the world around them.  -- Culturebot [read original article]

Having Dan Rothenberg (Chekhov Lizardbrain) direct and the hollowing, postmodern playwright Aya Ogawa (Oph3lia) translate is just icing on the cake. -- That sounds cool [read original article]

Aya Ogawa's brilliant translation meets the challenge of finding an English equivalent for Okada's highly colloquial Japanese... -- The New Yorker 

5 men, 2 women

Okada's award-winning breakout piece follows several young people in Tokyo as they wind their way through a one-night stand (which turns into a five-night stand) and anti-war protests, during the start of the American war against Iraq. Okada perfectly captures the uneasy sense of apathy and impotence among the youth generation in Japan through his unique circuitous and hyper-colloquial language as well as through the mundane details in his story.

English language premiere produced by Witness Relocation at LaMama, directed by Dan Safer, in 2010.

Published in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama.

4 women

A romping black comedy tracking the friendship of three Japanese women over the course of 2 decades. A desolate island in the South Seas. A pair of twin sisters, their blind stepmother, two friends who plot the murder of one of the twins, and a ¥5 million giraffe statuette. The hilarity and violence that ensue are the subject of this black comedy/horror/coming-of-age play and 1999 winner of the prestigious Kishida Kunio Prize.

Staged as a reading at Japan Society on Monday April 7, 2008 directed by Ogawa

1 man and another person

We all know what happens to Didi and Gogo as they are waiting for Godot. But what about Godot -- what is he doing, as he is awaited? An existential look at the mundane and the apocalypse.

3 men, 1 woman

Following the story of three people and one ghost who first meet on-line and then the drama that ensues when they meet in person, Halcyon Days examines the cult popularity of suicide websites in contemporary Japanese culture.

English language premiere produced in London, Riverside Studios, in 2011, directed by Shoji Kokami.

2 men, 4 women

This comic triptych about office life in contemporary Japan, explores the relationship between temp workers and full-time workers in the declining economy.

In HOT PEPPER, three temps fret over where to host a farewell party for their colleague who has been laid off, which leads to a discussion about why they are the ones who have to organize it in the first place.

AIR CONDITIONER is a duet between a woman who is freezing in the office and a man who kind of has a crush on her. As much as they talk, they fail to communicate.

Finally, in the FAREWELL SPEECH, the laid-off temp worker describes her morning as she got ready to commute to work for the last time, and the surprise that was waiting on her doorstep: a dying cicada.

Published in The Methuen Anthology of Modern Asian Drama.

Originally written in Japanese by Yukio Shiba.

A whimsical story about the beginning and end of all life in the universe. Or the friendship between the Earth and the Moon. Or family and growing up.

This new adaptation was commissioned by Japan Society and produced there, directed by Alec Duffy.

3 men, 2 women

A man wishes his girlfriend were dead. 

His girlfriend wishes she could fall asleep on the subway and ride it forever as it travels ever deeper underground. She wakes up and finds herself at a dance party in her honor. When she returns, she finds that decades have gone by and she tends to her aged and dying boyfriend.

But actually, she was just daydreaming in front of her computer at work.

A play about navigating personal relationships, dreams, and the mundanity of everyday tedium against an urban landscape.

English language premiere produced by the Play Company at JACK in May28 - June 9 2014.

Published in Yale THEATRE magazine, Volume 43, Number 1.

7 men, 3 women

In a small harbor town in Japan, one by one, residents begin to lose their understanding of once familiar concepts such as "family," "ownership" and "freedom." These strange incidents are eventually linked to one resident, Shinji, who has been wandering around talking to his neighbors ever since his body and mind were taken over by an alien performing preparatory research on human beings before invading earth.

This translation was commissioned by Japan Society and Ogawa directed the play as a staged reading there in April, 2013.

3 men, 2 women

Originally written in Japanese by Toshiki Okada, to be performed in English, for Pig iron Theatre Company

In fantastic collaboration between Pig Iron Theatre Company and writer Toshiki Okada, Okada is inspired by reading Walden from his home in Tokyo.  A beautiful book, but only a dream.  But then 3/11 happens—those numbers will, for a generation of Japanese people, stand in for the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima.  In Tokyo, “unconfirmed” urban radiation levels are reported and milk is removed from supermarket shelves. In this atmosphere of deadly weirdness an architect who studies the homes of the homeless declares himself Prime Minister of Japan from his artist’s refuge in Kumamoto, far outside the city in Western Japan. For Toshiki, the Walden fantasy is becoming a growing necessity.

Presented at Philly Live Arts Festival 2012, Under the Radar 2013, TPAM Yokohama 2013.

https://www.pigiron.org/productions/zero-cost-house