Showcasing Murakami’s surrealism on stage

Which is why Anantha and his colleagues at Crea Shakthi, who were engrossed in the art of storytelling on stage, too were bitten by the Murakami bug. This is how they decided to adapt 10 of Murakami’s short stories from his book, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, into a series of short-plays, Urban Mirage. 

“All of us here have been fascinated with Murakami’s writing and we were eager to try and adapt his surreal stories to the theatre medium to see how that would turn out. Each of the 10 stories will be presented as 13 minute plays, which will be strung together as a single production. 

We have devised the plays in the surrealist theatre genre. For example, in one of the stories we present, the woman changes her appearance and personality every time she looks at her watch. 

Her part will be played by five different women who will switch with each other throughout that performance with each woman representing a different personality of the character,” explains Anantha, co-director and co-writer of the play. 

George, Meenu, Karthikeyan and Hari Koushik are the other directors of the play, and it was co-written by Padma Murali, Mira, Ganapathi and George. 

Anantha adds, “The play will also feature live music using keyboard, guitar and conga.” Even for the most casual reader of Murakami, it is hard to miss the strong connection that Murakami has with jazz music. Murakami, before he began his writing career, had spent almost an entire decade running Peter Cat, a Tokyo jazz bar. 

Even after selling the jazz bar with his advent into literature, the writer still maintains a sizable personal record library, weaves jazz references into his fiction, and has even written essay collections like Portrait in Jazz and Portrait in Jazz 2 in an ode to the music genre. Ananth says they have taken into account this penchant of his while composing the music. 

“Since jazz music is a recurring motif in Murakami’s works. The composition is heavily inspired by jazz,” he adds. The show is a culmination of two months of workshops and rehearsals as part of Crea-Shakthi’s Spotlight Initiative. 

“In the Spotlight Initiative, we train theatre enthusiasts in Chennai who have no previous training in the field over the course of two months. So, all of the performers you will see on stage will be performing in a production for the first time. 

We trained them by making them read the original Murakami text to understand the essence of our stories and then mentored them through the adaptation,” explains Ananth.