Overview

A budding foreign playwright returns to Japan for one last attempt to free his Japanese artist girlfriend from seclusion in a farming village near the mountain resort of Takayama. To rescue Kimiko, the playwright Daniel Singer enlists a well-known film director and a high-spirited character actress to serve as go-betweens. But the pretext for the gathering at the Miyagawa's home is no pretext: they are working on a f ilm script about doomed lovers called The Love Suicides at Takayama. The couple have no peace and no privacy until the final scene where they follow the rituals of love suicide to its liberating end. A take-off on the double suicide, domestic tragedy plays of Japan's most revered playwright, The Love Suicides at Takayama is a screwball comedy, a type of cinema known for its farcical situations and fast-paced dialogue that, in this case, satirizes courtship and social dynamics in Japan.

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9798899902512

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Reviews

""Sheppard Ranbom has crafted a fascinating play set in contemporary Japan that echoes Chikamatsu Monzaemon's (1653-1725) dramas of the early 18th century. The dialogue is witty and engaging; the plot is realistic and ends with a surprising twist. Kimiko-caught in a web of conflicting demands-and Daniel-self-aware and frustrated that he cannot be with her-add modern, psychological and irreverent elements to the domestic tragedy.""-C. Andrew Gerstle, authorof Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays and Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu.

Author Information

Sheppard Ranbom is a poet and playwright and the author of three books from Finishing Line Press: I Didn't Know Kyoto (2023), a chapbook written in a Japanese style favoring immediacy, brevity, and unabashed feeling; the comic novella in verse, Shadows of the Pines (2024), which satirizes the poetry industry and presents the rich inner life of a poetry teacher who is aided by the spirits of poets of the past and tormented by his own words; and this play. He is also the author of the book-length poem, King Philip's War (Settlement House, 2008), which recounts the genocide of the New England Algonquians. His website can be found at sheppardranbom.com

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