Kenta Yamazaki | "Theater of Zombies Who Want to Make a Movie"
A review of Toshiki Okada's new work, "Theater of Zombies Who Want to Make a Movie," exploring representation and the audience's body.Summary
Theater of Zombies Who Want to Make a Movie (written and directed by Toshiki Okada) was staged as the first production after Okada became artistic director of the Theater Department at Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre. It reworks his latest work Sliding Away, originally written for the repertoire of Germany's Hannover State Theatre, with a Japanese cast and staff. The play is set on the film set of zombies trying to make a movie, but the shooting never actually begins; instead, the zombies exchange opinions on zombies making films. By overlaying zombies with various minorities in the real world, the work questions the asymmetry and power dynamics of "human representations of zombies," and can also be read as a discussion of queer and other marginalized existences. The zombies on stage eventually wipe off their makeup and confront the audience with the fact that they are merely human actors playing zombies. It becomes clear that no actual zombie exists in the theater, highlighting Okada's idea of theater as a place that affirms the audience's bodies and presence. This work belongs to Okada's anti-anthropocentric lineage, from Eraser Mountain to Metamorphosis of a Living Room. Thanks to the actors' charm, a theme that could easily become a lecture on political correctness succeeds as an engaging performance, demonstrating theater's potential to bring questions into society.
(Source：artscape)