Big hearts in the Big Apple
U.S. theaters will hold a benefit for Japanese companies on tsunami anniversary Sunday.
Nonprofit theaters in New York are staging a benefit to help Japanese theater companies.
The New York City nonprofit theater world has come together for a starstudded benefit for Japanese theater companies on this Sunday’s anniversary of the massive northern Japan earthquake and tsunami.
The effort, Shinsai: Theaters for Japan (“shinsai” means “great earthquake” in Japanese), is billed as a nationwide initiative, but it has gained little traction in Los Angeles, where leading companies say they weren’t approached until too late, if at all.
In Manhattan, Patti LuPone, Richard Thomas and Mary Beth Hurt will be among the performers in two shows at the Cooper Union Great Hall — the venerable venue where Abraham Lincoln delivered his 1859 Cooper Unionaddress.
In Los Angeles, the Loyola Marymount University department of theater arts and dance will stage a benefit Sunday at 8 p.m. in the campus’ Strub Theatre, and the Cal State Los Angeles theater department will offer staged readings Sunday at 3 p.m. in the lobby of the Japanese American National Museum in downtown L.A. Playwright-actor Jeanne Sakata will recite a Shinsai-related poem as a curtain raiser for the Sunday matinee at the Theatre@boston Court in Pasadena.
The New York performances, directed by Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher, will feature all 17 short works and song works written, revised or specifically authorized for the occasion by such eminences as Edward Albee, Suzan-lori Parks, Doug Wright, Richard Greenberg. and the composer-librettist team of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, who updated and combined two songs from their musical, “Pacific Overtures,” with a new narration focused on the 2011disaster.
Seven of the plays are by Japanese writers, and two are from California-based Japanese Americans, Berkeley playwright Philip Kan Gotanda and Naomi Iizuka, head of UC San Diego’s playwriting program.
A spokeswoman at L.A.’S Eastwest Players, the nation’s biggest-budgeted Asian ethnic theater company, said this week that it learned about the Shinsai effort in January, in an email from Sakata, who has performed with Eastwest. The company has entered its name on the Shinsai project website as a show of support, but will not perform.
The website lists 69 participants nationwide, but officials at two of the five in Southern California, the Cal State Long Beach-affiliated California Repertory Company and the University of Redlands theater department, said this week that they were not participating.
While the New York effort involves leading companies including the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and Atlantic Theater Company, a spokeswoman for L.A.’S flagship stage company, Center Theatre Group, said Thursday that artistic director Michael Ritchie “was never contacted” about the benefit.
Theatre Communications Group, a New Yorkbased national service organization for nonprofit theaters, has served as a clearinghouse for the Shinsai project. TCG spokeswoman Dafina Mcmillan said in emails that the word was spread starting in December via emails “to all managing and artistic leaders of our 500 member theaters,” as well as in emailed newsletters and postings on the TCG website.
The effort has been spearheaded by James Yaegashi, a New York-based actor who grew up in Yamagata in quake-devastated northern Japan, where his parents still live.
Yaegashi said he had worked in the past with Carey Perloff, artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, and was able to enlist her company as a participant — the only major one on the West Coast.
Companies not staging performances on the anniversary can help by spreading the word to patrons about donations to the Shinsai beneficiary, the Japan Playwrights Assn., which will disburse proceeds to theaters recovering from the earthquake, Yaegashi said.
The two L.A. performances were instigated by professors with a particular interest in Japanese theater. Kevin Wetmore, chair of the LMU department of theater arts and dance, is co-editor of the book “Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance.” In addition to seven of the nonmusical pieces from the Shinsai website, he said, the show by LMU will include an original play written by a student and several original dances.
At Cal State Los Angeles, professor Susan Mason, who studied Japanese theater in Japan in 2009 on a Fulbright fellowship, and graduate student Kymm Swank decided it made sense to stage their performance in Little Tokyo and approached the Japanese American National Museum.