(Photo: Stephen Hilger)
Aya Ogawa's Oph3lia, whose opening coincides with that of the new and improved HERE Arts Center, is a brilliant exploration of suspension--in time, in space, between words, and between bodies. So much so that walking out of the theatre last Thursday night I was rendered, much like the first Ophelia in this Murakami-esque work, silent.
Reimaging Ophelia within a contemporary society, the play introduces three different Ophelias, each with her own individual story of marginality but also following a through line between them so that the Shakespearean hysteria accorded Hamlet's jilted escalates in perfect proportion throughout the scenes. The first Ophelia, Shizuka (Ikuko Ikari), is a Japanese woman in Manhattan, spatially and linguistically overwhelmed by the clutter and sputter of the city around her; the second, Cissy (Eunjee Lee), a Korean student in a school in China for non-Chinese girls; the third (Marueen Sebastian), a translator between a US-based production company and a Latin American director and his muse. In each scenario, the Ophelia becomes, as HERE dramaturge Pete McCabe writes, "an outsider within [...] outsiders"; yet even as Shizuka's silence stretches into Cissy's ecstatic emanation into the translator's forcing out of others' words, it is not Ophelia who is out of sync but rather all the other, secondary characters creating a suffocating field around her.
There is a sense of the posthuman going on here, or perhaps, more accurately, transhuman (though I'm sure Tweedster will call me on this as it's his personal fetish more than mine): Shizuka adopts silence to forget a self that is already forgotten by the city she barely inhabits and Cissy is shy, antagonistic, effusive amid the schoolgirls who themselves act out all the possibilities of girl-ness including the self-repression (and refusal of it--loved bad-girl Kate [Magin Schantz] who reveled in her nastiness) that insinuates itself during the trials of adolescence. Each enacts strategies of survival that exceed prescribed limitations while also denying something integral to survival. The translator becomes simultaneously an Ophelia undone by the contradictions within her father's, brother's, and lover's words and a more symbolic examination of what it means to translate not only text into play but this particular text, and this particular character, into something anew. I first knew Ogawa when she was playing J.R. Oppenheimer in International WOW Company's The Bomb and was amazed then by her presence. She is still very much present as writer and director in Oph3lia, and it is certainly her transpositional voice, in all its own emanations, that links the three renderings.
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