JANUARY 12, 2010 Volume 2, Issue 1
Ralph Ford
Bringing Murakami’s ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ to the stage has been as peculiar and challenging as the book itself Psychic Creta Kano meets with Toru Okada in a scenefrom Stephen Earnhardt’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
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BY JERRY PORTWOOD eading Haruki Murakami’s prose can be a frustrating endeavor. Filled with surreal characters and moments—talking cats, mystical sex workers, magical jellyfish, mysterious amputees—his books are packed with inexplicable metaphors that don’t always seem to add up to anything substantial. While the Japanese writer possesses a rabid group of followers and each book is debated intensely in a multitude of languages, the ultimate conclusion of a story is often exasperating. The thought of adapting one of his stories, let alone an entire novel, would be an intimidating, even impossible, feat for most. Just think of all those fans who would hate you if you screwed it up. That hasn’t stopped Stephen Earnhardt from attempting to make the story his own— and in a format he had practically no experi-
ence with before he began his undertaking more than six years ago. Earnhardt’s theatrical adaptation of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, an elaborate multimedia production, premieres at the Ohio Theatre Jan. 15 and is part of the annual Under the Radar Festival. The mind-boggling enterprise encompasses puppets, human actors, video projections and sound effects and, perhaps, even a few serendipitous breaches of time and space. “I wanted to create a theater of dreams,” Earnhardt explains during a recent weekday morning rehearsal. Located on a top-floor rehearsal room on the far West Side, amidst the hammering and cracking of construction at the soon-to-be-completed Jerome Robbins Theater, the actors and crew are awash in activity. Earnhardt attends to both creative and practical concerns, speaking to an assistant via Skype while a stage manager
herds actors into another room to prepare for voiceover recording. At the same time, a crew of puppeteers under Tom Lee’s direction begins to whisk practice puppets around the room, manipulating a childlike wooden bed, clothes attached to bamboo sticks and other puzzling implements made of string and rags. All of this energy feels less like a typical theater rehearsal than some sort of work camp for innovation. Which should be expected since Earnhardt didn’t begin his creative life in the theater. He began as a classically trained percussionist at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy. When he entered the professional world, he shifted gears as director of production for Miramax Films during those heady years in the 1990s when the indie team changed the rules of cinema. He later directed and produced Mule Skinner Blues, a feature-
length documentary in 2002 about eccentric artists in a Southern trailer park. In 2002, he found himself at a crossroads: He was 36 years old, stranded in Los Angeles when he wondered whether he would return to film or travel down a different path. He decided to book a trip to Southeast Asia and ended up spending 10 months traveling from Vietnam to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia. “Along the way, people I’d meet kept handing me Murakami,” Earnhardt says. “I read eight of his books back to back. It shaped the next chapter of my life.” In many of Murakami’s books, the central narrator is a lonely man in an urban environment without a clear purpose in life. Earnhardt related to these characters in search
MURAKAMI on page 5