Following its May world premiere in Mannheim, Germany, and a summer spent gathering great reviews from its European tour, "Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich" finally debuted in Japan last week at the Kanagawa Arts Theatre in Yokohama.
This latest work by cutting-edge playwright-director Toshiki Okada, 41-year-old founder of the influential Chelfitsch theater company, is set in one of Japan's more than 50,000 konbini (convenience stores), whose numbers have been rising since the 1970s even as the population declines.
Brightly lit and air-conditioned, these sanitized emporiums typically pack around 2,500 neatly displayed items into roughly 100 sq. meters of sales area, along with copying, cash-dispensing and ticketing machines. Hyper-efficient, standardized and omnipresent, they have become, in Okada's view, not only indispensable to daily life, but diminutive "Holy Lands" in superficial Japanese society — a phenomenon incisively satirized by "SPSDVR."
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