Our Planet

Of the infinite stars in the galaxy, a young boy fixates on one that is located ten-thousand light years away and has long perished by the time of the boy’s discovery. Imagine that at that same moment, the boy is actually an old man being watched by someone on a faraway star! Such are the mind-bending ideas whirling through Our Planet, a tale by the young Japanese playwright Yukio Shiba that juxtaposes the minutia of an average Japanese family’s life with the galactic events of the Earth’s birth and death. Inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Shiba’s Our Planet, won the most prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2010. (English translation by Katsunori and Miharu Obata). For this reading, New York-based director Alec Duffy, Obie Award winner and founder of the critically acclaimed Hoi Polloi theater company, will lead a cast of American actors. Read in English.

※ Playwright Yukio Shiba with join the post-reading Q&A by video broadcast from Japan.