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 a phenomenon incisively satirized by ¡°SPSDVR.¡±
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