Go Aoki is one of Japan's most in-demand playwrights and directors. The small venues where his Gring theater company typically stages his works attract drama-world insiders — as a result, besides taking Gring on the road in early 2008, Aoki has already been enlisted for three high-profile collaborations.
The first of these came in answer to a plea from 47-year-old Hidenori Inoue, founder of the theater company Shinkansen, for Aoki to write a play based on the tragic life of the Tokugawa Shogunate-era samurai Izo Okada. The new Aoki play now running at the Aoyama Theater, "Izo," goes easy on the spectacular effects characteristic of Inoue's "entertainment-style" samurai plays, favoring instead a brilliantly crafted human drama.
After "Izo" closes in early February, Aoki will direct "Uranus," an original work by 33-year-old Tomohiro Maekawa, that has been selected to launch a new series of plays by young dramatists at the small, atmospheric Aoyama Enkei theater in the round. Then in August, Yukio Ninagawa will stage a new play by Aoki based on the manga "Glass Mask."