Have you made your first visit of the new year to the theater yet? If not, "Umi yorimo nagai yoru (The Night Longer than the Sea)," being staged by Seinendan at Theater Tram in Sangenjaya, will surely whet your appetite for what promises to be a lively and exciting year on the Tokyo drama scene.
A 1999 masterpiece by Seinendan's leader, Oriza Hirata, this one-act play is, he says, a "homage" to the autobiographical novel "Shanghai no Nagai Yoru (Life and Death in Shanghai)" by Chinese author Nien Cheng, which is also an exploration of the mass psychology of the Cultural Revolution (1966-77) in Maoist China.
Here, though, the setting is the lounge of a women's college dormitory house somewhere in small-town Japan. The dormitory faces a crisis -- it is scheduled to be demolished to facilitate the enlargement of a U.S. military base. A group of residents who oppose the demolition gather together around a table to debate what to do.