Andy Curtis and Denise Clarke had to brush up on their phonetic Japanese for Kawasaki Exit.

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24th Annual High Performance Rodeo
Big Secret Theatre
Thursday, January 7 - Sunday, January 31

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Homono lashiku is Japanese for “keeping it real,” which could possibly be the central theme for One Yellow Rabbit’s latest play, Kawasaki Exit, written by Blake Brooker and debuting this week as part of the High Performance Rodeo.

Every year the Rabbits cook up something new for the Rodeo and this year, Brooker is bringing an unusual creation to the table with his play Kawasaki Exit. It is an elaborate confection of contemporary myth-making, built on a solid layer of simple undecorated storytelling, spiced with ferociously challenging technical aspects integral to the performance.

“The actors in the play have said that it was the hardest thing they have done in theatre,” says Brooker. “We worked on it like monks illuminating a bible.”

The play is meant for an English audience, yet over half of it is delivered in Japanese, which the actors had to learn phonetically until they could reproduce the lines at conversational speed. The second act begins where the first act ends and then winds backward in time to the opening event of the first act. So, the final line of Act 1, is the first line in Act 2, the second last line spoken in the first act will be the second line delivered in Act 2 and so on, but this time in English. Confused? Each line of dialogue is delivered in reverse order, but not spoken backward.

“The way this works is a bit like what audiences have seen in films like Memento, Run Lola Run or Groundhog Day, where the action is repeated, but the information you get is different,” says Brooker. “It is a simple story. I like to think of it as a mystery romance, but it is not overly complex. As the saying goes, you don’t know a mystery and what happens, until it has happened.”

Kawasaki Exit is myth-making about a real story that plays out in Japan on some of the darker online social networking sites — websites designed and used by people looking to end their lives, most often in the company of complete strangers. It’s Facebook for suicides.

“I remember reading about this years ago,” says Brooker. “Most of the deaths are caused by carbon monoxide poisoning, and most of these people never knew each other before meeting online. I wondered what it would be like to be in a car with unknown people to drive somewhere to die.”

To this uniquely Japanese form of death, Brooker built a narrative that included Japanese dialogue for the three characters in the play, but it is not what he calls a “fetishistic copy of Japanese culture.” It is a Japanese story as told by North Americans and performed for an English-speaking audience.

“Stories are usually brought from other English speaking countries,” says Brooker. “For example, Americans like to translate English television programs into American programs, but that is an easy thing to do. What I wanted was to have this story completely without touchstones for an English audience, to bury yourself in a musicality of a language where there is nothing familiar.”

Brooker is not fluent in Japanese, so he asked translator, writer and actor Manami Hara of Vancouver to help with the translation of the dialogue. The final draft contained lines in English, a written translation in phonetic Japanese and an MP3 of pronunciation to listen to at conversational speed. For the performers, it was a tremendous challenge. “The actors worked on pure muscle memory, that I think is one of the more interesting challenges to this play, which will be passed on to the audience in a way. Without the occasional words from European languages cropping up, words in French or, say, Spanish, English speakers will be totally immersed in the reality of the play,” says Brooker. The first half of the play will have subtitles projected on a screen above the actors for the audience to read. “But I hope that people will become engaged with the story enough they will not find it necessary.”

“When you do something new it is all about waiting for the reaction. With this we will let the market decide,” says Brooker. “For now, I am just homono lashiku.”