"It's f-cking amazing! I don't know what else to say. I'm really happy and really moved and I'm so humble about that."

One of the most influential, magnetic — and busy — English playwrights at work today, 43-year-old Simon Stephens opened his round eyes wide and laughed with delight when I told him I'd just seen his desperately romantic 2011 smash-hit play "Wastwater" at the cozy Kinsen-Pit studio in downtown Tokyo — and that I would soon also be seeing, uptown and in Japanese, his hugely acclaimed work "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," which premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2012.

Adapted from a 2003 novel of the same name by Mark Haddon, this work that literally brought the house down last December, when part of the ceiling fell onto the audience during a performance at the Apollo Theatre in the West End (just a month after this writer saw it there), centers on a withdrawn 15-year-old named Christopher Boone who finds the body of a neighbor's dog one night while he's wandering around his nondescript suburban English neighborhood. Distraught to be suspected of killing the dog, this young math genius turns detective to find the real culprit.