In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From the Editor
  • Siyuan Liu

This issue starts with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei's appreciation of Leonard Pronko (1927–2019), noted kabuki scholar and teacher who passed away late 2019. Building on her profile of Pronko for Asian Theatre Journal's "founders of the fields" series (28: 2, 2011), Sorgenfrei offers a touching personal profile of her former professor as an extraordinary human being.

As evidence to the flourishing field of Japanese theatre studies pioneered by Pronko and his peers, this issue continues with a special section on contemporary Japanese theatre with a combination of articles, reports, a translation, and a performance review essay. We start with Cody Poulton's piece on the Osaka-based company Ishinha, known for its spectacularly-scaled productions under its founder Matsumoto Yūkichi (1946–2016), whose reputation has been overshadowed by his better-known contemporaries such as Suzuki Tadashi. Disbanded shortly after Matsumoto's death, the company deserves our attention with its marriage of "the sacred and the commercial, low culture, and grand themes."

Moving on to the next generation, Poulton reports on Hirata Oriza (b. 1962), a leading contemporary playwright-director best-known for his influential style of "contemporary colloquial theatre" that "marks a sudden and sober end to the noisy, celebratory theatre of the 1980s." Focusing on Hirata's 2019 Vancouver lecture on his stage adaptation of Takahashi Gen'ichirō's novel The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature, a dramatization of the Meiji literary scene, Poulton reminds us of the century-long endeavor by modern Japanese spoken theatre artists to construct stage dialogues for the Japanese language where the "common social discourse… is conversation (会話 kaiwa), not dialogue (対話 taiwa). The two are completely different and the latter hardly exists in Japan."

The influence of Hirata's "contemporary colloquial theatre" is arguably most acutely manifested in Okada Toshiki (b. 1973), whose [End Page v] company chelfitsch has frequently performed internationally, largely due to the hyperrealistic, colloquial dialogue and performance style. Three pieces in this section are dedicated to his works around the March 11, 2011 triple disaster in Japan—9.1-magnitude earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdown—known together as 3/11. John Gillespie helps us make sense of the existential and aesthetic transformations in Okada's dramaturgy through four plays he has seen. We then focus on one of these plays, Time's Journey through a Room (2015), with Aya Ogawa's acclaimed translation and Justine Wiesinger's dissection of the "spatial, temporal, and contextual distance" this new colloquial theatre poses to the international audience, comparing and contrasting reactions to the production within and outside Japan.

In the final piece of the special section, Gillespie reviews the 2019 New York performance of Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth by Murai Yu (b. 1978), one of Japan's most innovative contemporary playwright-directors. As an appropriate coda to the special section, the production combines Japan's century-plus fascination with Shakespeare with the mega-hit manga series Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow's Joe, 1968–1973, with subsequent anime and television series).

The issue's regular sections start with Arnab Banerji's translation of The Corrupt Trappings of the Delhi Transport Corporation (1979), an important early piece by the Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch (JANAM), one of the most active street theatre groups in India since 1978. As an effective use of street theatre to reflect and help everyday struggles of the working class, this short play was staged in response to the DTC's planned fare hike and was instrumental in garnering public opinion that successfully stopped the change.

Our regular article section starts with Catherine Diamond's newest report, following her 2012 monograph on contemporary theatre in Southeast Asia, on the revival of Cambodia's modern spoken theatre lakhon niyeay, with focus on two directors who leverage the spoken form's realist content to address social ills while striving to attract new audiences with improved storytelling techniques. In contrast to Diamond's contemporary lens, Beiyu Zhang delves into historical Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, or Nanyang ("the South Sea"), in a fascinating transnational study of three Chinese performance groups in the region between the 1900s and 1930s. They include the Chaozhou dialect...

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