FRIDAY, JULY 17–SATURDAY, AUGUST 15
Novelist and short-story writer Haruki Murakami has a
cultish following that’s hooked on his bizarre epics infused with magical
realism and his crystalline short stories, which are regularly published in The
New Yorker. His magnetic characters are often fragile people making
their way in bustling, hard-edged urban settings in Japan, where jazz floats in
the air if you listen hard enough and the lines between imagination, wishful
thinking, and reality blur. After the Quake,
his collection of six short stories, is set against the aftermath of the 1995
Kobe earthquake. Tony Award winner Frank Galati took two of those stories and
wove them together for the stage, and Company One, a resident
company at the Boston Center for the Arts (539 Tremont Street,
Boston, 617.426.5000), is producing it to shake up the summer. See the personal
aftershocks of a public calamity — and a six-foot-tall frog that not only
talks, but quotes Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway. Get tickets ($15–$38) at
www.companyone.org.
