- Big in Japan,
- 2022
- 6 male - 6 female - 1 gender-neutral role
Playwright: Katerina Louvari Fasoi
- Inspired by extreme social phenomena found in contemporary Japan, Big in Japan explores the chaos and despair in which human beings find themselves immersed today. In a world moving at breakneck speed, where dreams are sacrificed in the name of profit and where growth, competitiveness and productivity are worshipped like gods, a fundamental question arises: “Is the life I am living worth living? And if it is not, is the answer to give up — or to fight to change it?” The characters in this episodic play — people far closer to us than we might imagine — struggle to give voice to the part of themselves that desperately seeks to escape the darkness and the dead end, to meet the demands placed upon them without surrendering. They may appear to exist far away from us, “in a distant land”, yet in reality they may carry within them a part of ourselves. The play consists of five self-contained stories, each focusing on an extreme social phenomenon: people who disappear; people who die from overwork; people who remain shut inside their homes for years; elderly men and women who, struggling to live their final years with dignity, deliberately commit minor offences in order to be sent to prison; and people who seek peace by taking their own lives in the notorious “suicide forest”. The stories are linked by a compère who invites us to enjoy these “strange and exotic tales”, stories that supposedly have nothing whatsoever to do with our own reality. But is that really the case?