Shuntaro Matsubara is the up-and-coming playwright who won the 63rd Kishida Prize for Drama, shocking both supporters and detractors across the theater world. “Stop. Let’s talk for a second. We’ve entered the 21st century, and we’ve turned into a mob all fleeing in one direction.” So begins Keep Your Front Up, which takes Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished play Downfall of the Egotist Johann Fatzer as its motif. It is the story of four out-of-place dead people who continue directly ahead down a single road. A variety of people emerge in front of them: the gatekeeper and secretary guarding the gates of law, workers, vacationers on a girls’ trip, marauders…the road begins to buckle under their weight. Where does it truly lead?
Young director Daichi Nakamura, who engages in contemplation between Tohoku and Tokyo, redirects the bold energy emitted from this play through the voices of contemporary audiences and toward a collective experience. Here we find a grand narrative/history of wars and earthquakes, the setbacks of democracy ̶ haunting us like ghosts along this road that lies in the gap between past and present, this world and the next. What kind of shock and transformation will “our” minds and bodies undergo when continually infused with these words?