"Zero Cost House" Zoom theater

NYT review

Earlier this week I read a review about "Zero Cost House," a play by Toshiki Okada, that's been newly "staged" for Zoom by the Philadelphia-based Pig Iron Theater Company.  I was intrigued and bought a ticket for this live streamed theater.  In the play, the character named Okada realizes that he is no longer as entranced by Walden and Henry David Thoreau as he used to be.  He feels like the younger Okada is somewhat naive.  At the same time, the younger Thoreau can look forward to a time when the older Thoreau will lose a sense of the vitality of Walden and be "arrogant."  The theme of arrogance and naiveté runs throughout the play -- some characters are always feeling like they are not able to be understood by others because of naivete or arrogance. The arrogant Okada feels that the younger Okada (and Thoreau) is childlike and naive, just like Thoreau felt that way about some "locals" he wrote about in Walden.  As characters become more sophisticated, they judge others and they lose the sense of enthrallment.   Pretty interesting!

Three take-aways:

1. How would a work of "theater" work online?  Really good.  I'm not sure how much more I would have gotten from this play if I saw it in person.  

2. It was good "lemonade" made with the lemons of the pandemic.  There were new and captivating things that this adaptation could do ONLY BECAUSE of the limitations of being on Zoom.  For instance, all the actors, from different homes, filled the screens with different visual "elements" during the transition to the intermission.  It was 6 screens happening at once. Some were actions (a wind-up toy spinning on a table), some were YouTube videos, some were screens made by putting different colored paper in front of the camera.  In the background, a "cover band" was play a Bjork song.  This resolves into one of the actors singing in her room.  There were clever elements ("passing" of a book between screens for instance) that helped create the illusion that it was a shared space.

3. I didn't know a single Japanese playwright.  Now I know one!  I didn't know that actors could change roles throughout the play.  This made me pay attention to how the character changed and to the skill of the actors as the main character evolved.