An Existence So Vanilla, It’s Stifling
A War on Boredom in ‘The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise’
Laura Collins-Hughes
June 3, 2014: His secret is nothing terrible, just a thought that he’s kept private, but the man tells it bashfully: “I want to live more fully than I do now.” That’s the quiet wish of the restless 30-somethings in the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada’s The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise, presented by the Play Company in Dan Rothenberg’s splendidly cast production at Jack, in Brooklyn. Spoken aloud in a corner of New York that’s home to artisanal everything, a yearning to break free of the day-to-day resonates differently from the way it would in Tokyo. There’s no taboo to be broken here. Who among us hasn’t felt that urge, and not so secretly? Mr. Okada’s characters — identified only as Man 1, Woman 1 and so on — are not suffering in any material way. They have jobs; they’re in relationships. The trouble, denoted by Mimi Lien’s cream and taupe set, is the colorlessness of their lives. Embedded in the paint scheme on the walls is a sort of graph line, mostly flat, with occasional shallow peaks and valleys.
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