When I saw the notice for Woolly Mammoth’s current play, Akira Kurosawa Explains His Movies and Yogurt (with live and active cultures!), I thought, “Oh, boy! Another play using food as metaphor!” and I wasn’t wrong. This wry, sly, insightful, and thoroughly enjoyable production mixes historical and biographical insights into Japanese and American cultures (both definitions) on so many levels I was reminded of the Ig Nobel Prizes’ motto: “First it makes you laugh, then it makes you think.”
Julia Izumi, the playwright, performs in the lead role. As the famous filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, she travels through his life and work projecting and explaining, and also deflecting and avoiding explanation of personal grief – through guess what? Yogurt! Here’s the metaphor. It’s played for laughs, as a popup non sequitur, but also as part of a throughline of cultural transition.
There’s a direct line drawn from traditional Japanese culture to today: from Kabuki theater, with the use of a traditional Japanese woodblock sound heralding each scene imagining Kurosawa’s past; to the excellent portrayal of a benshi (interpreter of dialog placards in Japanese theaters during silent movies) by Kento Morita; to talkies, including Kurosawa’s films; to ridiculous American yogurt commercials. These are all represented on stage by a mix of simultaneous live feeds, still projection, and acting by the five-person cast (with spontaneous breakouts of singing and dancing). There’s a large helping of Japanese language, some faithfully translated, some not, to keep the audience fully engaged. (My daughter, who speaks Japanese, clued me in to some of the latter.)
Julia Izumi plays a character named Julia (who she insists is not her) as well as Kurosawa in a parallel exploration of the meaning of grief and regret in human life. The suicide of Kurosawa’s brother, whose career as a benshi was cut short by the advent of talking pictures, and Julia’s uncle’s suicide coupled with her mother’s silence about it, become the foci of the twin resolutions.
Culture as story/yogurt as culture: pun, metaphor, obscure object of desire – told with humor and a refusal to reduce individuals to their culture, but a recognition that culture influences everything – this play has it all. Did I mention that the cast also play multiple parts terrifically, while continuously breaking the fourth wall? I laughed, I cried, I rushed home to eat yogurt. Everyone should do the same.
Akira Kurosawa Explains His Movies and Yogurt (with live and active cultures!) at Woolly Mammoth, by Julia Izumi, directed by Aileen Wen McGroddy, produced in partnership with New Georges, through June 1, 2025.