It may seem odd that the UMass Theater Department’s next mainstage production is based on a Japanese children’s book. But Night on the Galactic Railroad isn’t children’s theater. Its author, Kenji Miyazawa, who died in 1933, is Japan’s most revered writer of fantasy—a sort of combination Sendak, St.-Exupery and Tolkien whose playfully strange moral fables delved into fairly deep religious and philosophical themes.
Night on the Galactic Railroad tells the story of a boy named Giovanni and his only friend, Campanella. (These and other non-Japanese character names reflect the story’s dreamlike feel and its author’s all-inclusive worldview.) Giovanni’s father is absent and his mother is ill, so he toils after school in a printing shop and is mocked and bullied by his classmates. Shunned by the other kids at a riverside festival, he wanders alone and suddenly finds himself boarding a train with Campanella—a train bound for the Milky Way.
Miyazawa, who also came from a humble background, was a renaissance man whose protean interests, from geology and astronomy to human and animal rights to poetry and religion, all found their way into his books. This one takes its hero on a tour of the constellations, where he and his friend encounter an assortment of eccentric characters, including an archaeologist, a bird catcher who folds herons into candy, and an ecumenical, Charleston-dancing nun.
They also meet two castaways from the Titanic shipwreck. Except these are not survivors; they’re dead. For this train is bound for glory, taking its passengers—all except Giovanni—to heaven, which is located in the Milky Way’s dark Coal Sack nebula.
For Toby Bercovici, director of the UMass production, the play is a coming-of-age story “about a boy who needs to lose something very dear to him—in this case, his best friend—to stand by himself, on his own.” Miyazawa’s devout Buddhism flows through the piece like the glittering river of stars traversed by the trans-galactic train. The metaphorical black hole of heaven, the elusive space where true happiness resides, is more like nirvana than a Christian paradise.
Bercovici uses simple stage images and the audience’s imagination to create the play’s magical visions. She’s also given it a timeless setting that evokes Miyazawa’s devotion to the idea of the oneness of all creation.
Night on the Galactic Railroad: Feb. 24-26, March 3-5, Rand Theater, Fine Arts Center, UMass-Amherst. (413) 545-2511, www.umass.edu/theater.
If the UMass performance is a children’s classic for all ages, the New England Youth Theatre’s upcoming show is an age-old classic performed by kids. It’s Euripides’ tragedy Hecuba, a chapter from the Trojan War saga in which the widowed queen rages against the injustice of war and seeks vengeance against the Greeks who have slaughtered her family.
Directed by Eric Bass of Putney’s Sandglass Theater, the production puts the play’s bloody cycle of revenge in the context of “an age where pervasive media bombards our young actors with images of violence” and invites them “to digest and understand violence and justice in a way that inspires empathy rather than apathy.”
Hecuba: March 4-6, 11-13, New England Youth Theatre, 100 Flat Street, Brattleboro, (802) 246- 6398, neyt.org.
