Entry tags:
The Play's the Thing
A fairly low key day today. We got an overview of our final tests in each of Iijima's classes. They don't look too hard, so as long as I remember to study, I should be fine. We do have to write a report on the differences between the US and Japan, though, so I'll have to start thinking about what I want to do for that. Keleih and I did our presentation on restaurants and such, and that was fine, but I think I want something a little different for an actual report.
After class, though, I met up with my club members for our usual Friday meeting. Today the school theatre group was putting on their play, so we went to go see that instead of having practice.
It was... interesting. I caught maybe half of the dialogue (less towards the end, when I was getting tired), but I could still follow the plot fairly well. It started out with two guys playing soccer... and then space pirates come in and start threatening the one player, trying to make a deal of some kind with him. They're interrupted by a princess, and then by the police. Just when the action is getting intense, the scene freezes, and another character jumps in and starts summarizing the scene. You know the type-- the kind of thing that you get at the end of comics. "WILL the hero survive this encounter? Will the Princess OR the Pirates get their way?" etc.
And as it turns out, this WAS a comic, because the guy in the suit turns out to be the boss of a manga-ka, and as everybody else runs off stage, he starts berating the artist to finish drawing the rest of the comic. She's very reluctant to do so, but finally sits down at the table and starts writing... and then the scene starts up again.
So the play very quickly gets pretty complex, with the artist and her boss sitting in the middle of the unfolding scenes, making comments on the action while the characters of the story ignore them. There's a lot of back and forth between the pirates and the police and the princess... everybody seems to be interested in the soccer player, although I never did catch the reason for this.
Then the artist draws her boss into the comic, and things get even crazier. As the play went on, the division between reality and the story got more and more blurred, especially as the boss, while interacting with the other characters in the story, started yelling comments at the artist.
More back and forth with the different groups... the soccer player showed up with a copy of Shonen Jump (supposedly from 1990? And the play was set in 2054 or so), which was somehow significant, but there was a lot of dialogue I wasn't catching at this point, so I started getting a little confused. The soccer was important, as the other characters were asking about it, and he kept repeating the lines, "blue sky, green field, white lines, white goal." But what the real significance was, I couldn't figure out.
In the end, the woman police officer gets killed by the princess, and the other police is about to kill her in return, but is stopped by the soccer player. Everybody else runs on set, and there is a lot of arguing. The princess does get killed, but then the boss complains that the artist is being too cruel, so she throws the scene out and rewrites it. At last it is revealed that the boss is Kokeru, the guy everybody's been after this whole time, and the soccer player is Kojiro, who is... somebody else. Kojiro runs off with the Princess, and then everybody comes out dressed in soccer uniforms and starts a game, with the artist as referee.
It really was an interesting play, and definitely admirable for its complexity and overlapping plots.* I just wish I'd understood more of what was going on-- especially with the soccer part; I have no idea what that was all about. But everybody did pretty well acting their parts, and I was impressed that they managed to tell such a complex story using a really, really minimalist set (basically just some stairs leading to a raised platform, and five doors).
Definitely worth the watch.
I did a bit of planning when I got home... I looked up festivals in Tochigi this afternoon on the internet, and there are a fair handful that are close enough for me to get to. Plotting them out on my schedule, though, it seems like almost all happen in that second to last week of July. That's the week after our final tests, though, so I should have plenty of time to go and see them.
Now I just gotta grab some people to go with...
*I realize the summary above probably makes it sound really jumbled and full of crack. But it really did seem to have an overall plot, I just couldn't always follow it due to the language issue.
After class, though, I met up with my club members for our usual Friday meeting. Today the school theatre group was putting on their play, so we went to go see that instead of having practice.
It was... interesting. I caught maybe half of the dialogue (less towards the end, when I was getting tired), but I could still follow the plot fairly well. It started out with two guys playing soccer... and then space pirates come in and start threatening the one player, trying to make a deal of some kind with him. They're interrupted by a princess, and then by the police. Just when the action is getting intense, the scene freezes, and another character jumps in and starts summarizing the scene. You know the type-- the kind of thing that you get at the end of comics. "WILL the hero survive this encounter? Will the Princess OR the Pirates get their way?" etc.
And as it turns out, this WAS a comic, because the guy in the suit turns out to be the boss of a manga-ka, and as everybody else runs off stage, he starts berating the artist to finish drawing the rest of the comic. She's very reluctant to do so, but finally sits down at the table and starts writing... and then the scene starts up again.
So the play very quickly gets pretty complex, with the artist and her boss sitting in the middle of the unfolding scenes, making comments on the action while the characters of the story ignore them. There's a lot of back and forth between the pirates and the police and the princess... everybody seems to be interested in the soccer player, although I never did catch the reason for this.
Then the artist draws her boss into the comic, and things get even crazier. As the play went on, the division between reality and the story got more and more blurred, especially as the boss, while interacting with the other characters in the story, started yelling comments at the artist.
More back and forth with the different groups... the soccer player showed up with a copy of Shonen Jump (supposedly from 1990? And the play was set in 2054 or so), which was somehow significant, but there was a lot of dialogue I wasn't catching at this point, so I started getting a little confused. The soccer was important, as the other characters were asking about it, and he kept repeating the lines, "blue sky, green field, white lines, white goal." But what the real significance was, I couldn't figure out.
In the end, the woman police officer gets killed by the princess, and the other police is about to kill her in return, but is stopped by the soccer player. Everybody else runs on set, and there is a lot of arguing. The princess does get killed, but then the boss complains that the artist is being too cruel, so she throws the scene out and rewrites it. At last it is revealed that the boss is Kokeru, the guy everybody's been after this whole time, and the soccer player is Kojiro, who is... somebody else. Kojiro runs off with the Princess, and then everybody comes out dressed in soccer uniforms and starts a game, with the artist as referee.
It really was an interesting play, and definitely admirable for its complexity and overlapping plots.* I just wish I'd understood more of what was going on-- especially with the soccer part; I have no idea what that was all about. But everybody did pretty well acting their parts, and I was impressed that they managed to tell such a complex story using a really, really minimalist set (basically just some stairs leading to a raised platform, and five doors).
Definitely worth the watch.
I did a bit of planning when I got home... I looked up festivals in Tochigi this afternoon on the internet, and there are a fair handful that are close enough for me to get to. Plotting them out on my schedule, though, it seems like almost all happen in that second to last week of July. That's the week after our final tests, though, so I should have plenty of time to go and see them.
Now I just gotta grab some people to go with...
*I realize the summary above probably makes it sound really jumbled and full of crack. But it really did seem to have an overall plot, I just couldn't always follow it due to the language issue.
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