What kind of play is this? Well, it’s a good one, yet one that’s difficult to capture in complete sentences. My notes mostly consist of single words or phrases, among them “quiet,” “rich with time,” “waving back and forth,” and “arrogant? elegant?” But we can describe it as an autobiographical attempt by the writer Toshiki Okada to engage in a dialogue with his own younger self by 15 years, as he braids together his response to Thoreau’s Walden, the survivalist visions of the Japanese architect Kyohei Sakaguchi in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and Björk’s second album, Post.
The ensemble of five takes turns portraying the playwright himself (as well as a cranky Thoreau and a loosely-screwed-down Sakaguchi), but it is Dito van Reigersberg who perhaps best catches the essence of Okada as a diffident, Japanese Bob Newhart (simile thanks to OTC). With a gesture that suggests either the scrawl from Tristram Shandy or the last flight of Challenger, van Reigersberg indicates the “trajectory” of Okada’s career. Rachel Christopher spends a good chunk of her stage time simply reading Walden and taking notes, but her expressive eyes tell an eloquent story nonetheless. Ephemeral.
- Zero Cost House, by Pig Iron Theatre Company and Toshiki Okada, directed by Dan Rothenberg, Clarice Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Md.