What We're Seeing: Kaimaku Pennant Race’s "HAMLET | TOILET" at UTR
Centering on an act of fecal filial piety, Murai’s creation invites a whimsical wiping of the story you thought you knew.
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After an excruciating period of outcry and (thankfully) premature grief over the almost-cancellation following a severance by long-time host The Public Theater, New York’s preeminent forum for international and experimental theater has returned loud and proud.
The Under the Radar Festival, which has always mingled international artists with local ones in pursuit of what the festival’s founder, Mark Russell, refers to as “the global downtown,” has uniquely felt the pressure of the rising costs of cultural exchange, an unfortunate economic reality in an increasingly isolationist geo-political environment worldwide.
Despite these challenges, the show must go on, encouraging New Yorkers to look beyond the American myopia of our artistic-exportation soft power privilege and engage with welcoming artists of global renown in their own languages, on their own terms, in their own shows– like Japanese theater company Kaimaku Pennant Race’s HAMLET | TOILET.
Led by playwright-director auteur Yu Murai, KPR’s genre-bending view has been described as "hyper-nonsensical absurdist philosophical comedy," kneading highly stylized Japanese cultural references into kaleidoscopic, tableau takes on Western masterpieces. The company has made previous NYC appearances with their groundbreaking Romeo & Toilet and 2019’s boxing ring manga-meets-Macbeth Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth. In a similar dramaturgical vein, HAMLET | TOILET riffs on Shakesepare’s tragedy with a quintessential Japanese idiosyncrasy: the “greatest toilet culture in the world.”
Number two or not number two? That is the question asked in this zany production, posed in a very catchy rap after quite possibly the most iconic opening scene of the Festival: personifying a toilet. The cast of three, adorned in KPR’s signature white bodysuits (purposefully sperm-like, to mimic the familial problematics of almost any Shakespearean protagonist they take on adapting at this point), are arranged to embody a toilet seat, handle, and sitter, taking turns spouting and sputtering “to be or not to be” as if in the throes of anal agony. Their clipped, a capella refrain picks up speed moving from staccato to forceful bellows all punctuated by flatulence, resulting in a universally side-splitting humor as an icebreaker into the world of Murai’s play.
Thus establishing everybody poops as a great equalizer, the play moves to introduce us to the Hamlet-adjacent character, cursed in this iteration to possess the iconic, torturous psychic blockage as newly iconic, torturous bowel blockage. Centering on an act of fecal filial piety, Murai’s version of Hamlet (played with humorous, earnest gusto by Takuro Takasaki) undergoes an anime-adjacent power-up to receive the spirit of his father inside his bowels, accepting his belly pain as his own father’s suffering. Until his father’s business on earth is finished, Hamlet’s “business” won’t be finished either…. It’s almost infuriating how ingenious it all is.
Takasaki is joined by G.K. Masayuki (Ophelia, Claudius, Horatio) and Yuki Matsuo (Patient, Laertes, Marcellus), creating a tornado of frenetic energy to bring the zany premise to life. Rather than a didactic scene-by-scene copy-paste, Murai instead cherry-picks plot-essential scenes to magnify and turn topsy-turvy in a brisk ninety minutes, dialing the energy and circumstances up to a hundred.
Engaging with such a whimsical reworking requires at least some base knowledge of the source material (much to the confusion of the chitchatters sitting behind me). Exemplary highlights of Murai’s convincing concept include Ophelia being flushed down the toilet, a PVC pipe confessional, Hamlet calling out for his mommy to wipe him, and later ending the play defecating in a slain Claudius’ mouth (now that’s king shit). Signature to the play’s absurdist style is Murai’s use of precise, looped repetition, utilizing the comedy rule of threes to run a scene over and over in the same way one ruminates on the same thoughts over and over– especially when sitting alone with one’s bare thoughts on the toilet.
The stage itself is relatively bare, consisting of a suggestive three-stalled frame designed with artistic and economic flexibility in mind. Flanking the stage are monitors for English supertitles, allowing the non-Japanese speaking audience to see a semblance of Murai’s signature copious word play, infusing the Elizabethan essence with modern Japanese nods. With so much repetition involved in playing the same scene over and over again, the eye scansion between action and translation flows minimally once you catch on to the gimmick, creating a seamless, unintrusive bilingual experience.
Besides being an excellent economical choice for international touring due to the small cast and design size, the play was pointed out by the audience Q&A as also being prime for students to engage with, no doubt because of the accessibility of potty humor encouraging a fresh entrypoint to the Bard’s masterpiece. While UTR doesn’t particularly cater to a student demographic, I would be keen to see further international touring of KPR’s work add student and youth performances.
KPR’s HAMLET | TOILET may be centered on man’s most private place, where one is alone with one’s thoughts and pure being, but the experience of the performance brings the audience together in a shared evening of laughter and unmistakably, unapologetically human matter/s. From the sing-song wordplay of the title to the topsy-turvy scenework of the actors, Murai’s creation invites a whimsical wiping of the story you thought you knew.
Production credits
Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race’s
HAMLET |TOILET
Written and directed by Yu Murai
New York City Premiere
Presented by Japan Society in partnership with Under the Radar Festival
The cast features Takuro Takasaki (Hamlet), G.K. Masayuki (Ophelia, Claudius, Horatio), and Yuki Matsuo (Patient, Laertes, Marcellus).
The creative team includes Music: TSUTCHIE (SHAKKAZOMBIE), Choreographer: Shinnosuke Motoyama, Video Designer & Operator: Takashi Kawasaki, Lighting Designer: Tsubasa Kamei, and Promotional Illustration: Kotobuki Shiriagari.
HAMLET |TOILET ran January 10-13, 2024, at the Japan Society (333 East 47th Street, Manhattan). The running time is 85 minutes, with no intermission. Performed in Japanese with English supertitles. For more information, please visit utrfest.org or https://japansociety.org/events/hamlet-toilet/.