[extended version from our playbill] Woolly’s New Work Department, Sonia Fernandez and Aysha Zackria, connected with Julia Izumi, playwright and actor in Akira Kurosawa […] to discuss theater-making, yogurt, and being weird. 

SONIA FERNANDEZ: Can you talk about the origins of the play? 

JULIA IZUMI: I had always wanted to write about Akira Kurosawa because he’s such a big Japanese figure internationally, and I didn’t know a lot about him or about film in general.  

My first play, where I feel like I found my voice, was a play about Murasaki Shikibu¹, a Japanese novelist who arguably wrote the first novel in the world. I was like Kurosawa could be a part of a series of plays about a Japanese figure who has made impacts globally that I can investigate further. 

Then I was in grad school, and I started having a lot of stomach issues. I was trying to eat things that were good for my gut health. I was eating a lot of yogurt – like a LOT of yogurt. I was riding in a car with one of the other playwrights in my [MFA Playwriting] program, and I was suddenly like, “Oh my gosh! I’ve got it! What if Akira Kurosawa is giving a lecture about his movies, but all he can talk about is yogurt.”  

SF: Julia, we’re curious about your relationship to storytelling. You’re in this piece and thinking about the several roles that you play in creating your work. Is this the first project that you’ve written and performed in? 

JI: I actually also did in that Murasaki piece. I played Murasaki Shikibu. 

SF: So, it is going to be a cycle! Who’s next? 

JI: The third one is a little up in the air. I’m thinking either Japanese baseball players playing in the American leagues or the guy who invented the Emoji.  

AYSHA ZACKRIA: Both thrilling. 

JI: Thank you. Yeah, both making big impacts in worlds I don’t know a lot about. Especially the baseball thing.  

SF: What is it like to be writing, knowing that you’re a character? 

JI: It’s both harder and easier in some ways. Easier because I’m like, “Well, who cares? I can just change this.” I’m a little bit less precious about it. Once I’m up there, I can flub around here and there, make it sound better. At the same time, my skills as an actor are pretty limited. I have a few more constraints to stick to, in a funny way.   

AZ: How close is Julia, you as a person in this interview right now, to Julia on stage? Are you the same Julia? Are you the different Julias for narrative purposes? 

JI: The Julia on stage is just a hair more full-of-herself and a little more braggadocious. She has the confidence to perform, to be up there and take up space, talking at an audience for a long time. She’s a slightly heightened version of me. 

AZ: How do you hold both the acting and the playwriting?   

JI: When I did it with Murasaki, we had a much shorter run, so I had to freeze the script² early. While I was in the rehearsal room, I was just an actor. But if there’s like really big questions about changing something, they can be asked. This time, because the process is longer, I’ll be staying in the playwright-actor situation for a bit longer. I’m hoping we can find ways for me to pop in and out. Then at a certain point, I want to be like, “Okay, from this point onward, Julia is just an actor.” I can be a little less jumbled in the brain. 

SF: I’m curious about your style. It’s quite singular to you.  How did you come to this irreverent, playful writing voice?   

JI: Irreverent is a really good word. Especially when I’m looking into the lens of history. When I was a kid, I hated history class because I was like, “Oh, this is so boring.”  Because of that, when I look into something historical, or a figure of some kind, I always try to ask, “How would young Julia like to receive this information?” – and make it a little less serious. I also just think it’s funny. 

I do think there are things that we take very seriously that maybe we don’t need to. If we didn’t take it so seriously, it would actually become more accessible. Theater being one of them, prices notwithstanding.  To the general public, theater gives an air of being highbrow. I think if people knew that theater is also just silly people playing pretend, then they might find it more relatable.  

SF: I see the seriousness in Akira Kurosawa. I studied his films in a college class, and they were held up as, “the pinnacle of filmmaking” – film, not movie. You chose “Explains His Movies,” which is a distinction about prestige and accessibility in art. The play itself attempts to take Akira down to a human level. 

JI: Absolutely, [it has] this assumption that you have to be really knowledgeable to get it. 

SF: And have reverence for the craft. 

JI: Yeah. I’m really into dismantling those things.  

As you can tell from my writing, I’m not as interested in realism. I try to see what the weirdos are doing. All my favorite playwrights around me, my friend playwrights who I love, are weirdos. 

It’s less about “weird” honestly because weird is another one of those things that people will think they’re not smart enough to understand. But really theatrical. Theater that understands that it’s theater as opposed to theater that thinks it’s a movie.  That’s what I want to see. 

SF: Some of the play is in Japanese and being translated – to varying degrees of truthfulness – by intertitles. Do you consider this play bilingual? 

JI: I wouldn’t call it bilingual, even though there is another language heavily included. I’ve used Japanese in my plays to varying degrees of how it’s understood to an audience who doesn’t necessarily speak Japanese.  

I feel like my generation of playwrights, especially those of us who are children of immigrants are in an era of playing around with how language is used on stage and what is communicated to an audience who might not understand the other language. There’s this gambit of not translating at all, or really making it translated, or maybe making it translated funnily. And I think all ways are valid, which is why in this play I kind of do a mix of all of it. 

The intertitles really did come from the idea of a presentation like, “Here’s the PowerPoint slide that goes with this lecture.” Then I realized it’s going to be really useful as a way of pointing out the lies that are happening, almost as footnotes.³ 

SF: I came across your essay about grief and your play Regretfully, So The Birds Are for Playwrights’ Horizons. How has your thinking about grief evolved while writing Akira Kurosawa…? 

JI: I also wrote this play [around the same] time. Although, the grief in this play is very different from the ones that I was experiencing then. I do feel like my plays are responding to my understanding of grief in the moment. 

I’m definitely not alone in writing about grief. I feel like most writers are writing about grief always, even if they’re not conscious of it or it’s not necessarily a tangible grief. This current process of grief I’m in is making me understand that we really actually still don’t know how to talk about it as human beings, even though this has been happening from the beginning. We’ve had thousands of years to prepare. 

SF: Is there anything else that you want to say to our readers? 

JI: I hope they have fun. Get some yogurt. Look at the things in your life you’re supposed to look at. Face the brave things. Yeah, that’s all. 

SF: Thanks for taking the time, Julia. 

_______ 

1. Born in the 10^th century, Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese novelist, poet and royal attendant. She is known for writing The Tale of Genji between 1000 and 1012. It is widely considered to be one of the world’s first novels. 

2. To “freeze” a script means to stop making edits. This needs to happen early enough in the process for the actors to memorize their lines and the production team to build their light and sound cues. 

3. While there may be lies in the play, there are no lies (that we are aware of) in this interview.