After the Quake

One of the main char­ac­ters of After the Quake (the play at Pi Theatre in Vancouver) is a frog, a six-foot tall frog that walks and talks and tries to save Tokyo from an earth­quake by bat­tling the angry Worm under­neath the city. Not only does Frog man­age to defeat Worm, he does so while hav­ing an exis­ten­tial cri­sis: he knows he is frog, but he also knows that, at least in some way, he is wholly unfrog. 

This is one of the sev­eral plot lines of the play adapted from Haruki Murakami’s story col­lec­tion After the Quake. At times the adap­ta­tion (by Frank Galati, asso­ciate direc­tor of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago) works very well: the dia­logue is funny and the char­ac­ters inter­act eas­ily and nat­u­rally. However, the nar­ra­tion, of which there is much, approx­i­mates nov­el­s­peak: that form of writ­ing meant only for read­ing to one­self, never to be spo­ken out loud. This nov­el­s­peak is most rec­og­niz­able by sen­tences that start with gerunds (verbs end­ing in –ing). The proof: when nar­rat­ing, the actors, a dynamic and capa­ble cast, spoke in awk­ward rhythms and sounded like they were recit­ing lines they had mem­o­rized rather than telling the audi­ence a story. 

Still, the plot lines were strong enough to keep the audi­ence engaged, and the dia­logue caused uproar­i­ous laugh­ter. In the end, the audi­ence gave a stand­ing ova­tion, which might be the best indi­ca­tion of whether to see the play.

After the Quake
November 19  –  December 2, 2009
Directed by Craig Hall and Richard Wolfe | Starring Manami Hara, Alessandro Juliani, Kevan Ohtsji, Tetsuro Shigematsu and Leina Dueck

Pi Theatre
1555 West 7^th Ave.
Vancouver