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The Washington Post
Natsu Onoda Power’s ‘Astro Boy’ takes imaginative flight
February 21, 2012
by Peter Marks
Maybe, if you ask really politely, Natsu Onoda Power will allow you to get up out of your seat at Studio Theatre, give her hardworking cast a good, swift shove into the wings and leave you alone onstage with all of her marvelous toys.
Okay, that’s totally not going to happen. But even if you’ll never get your hands on the joystick, it’s still safe to say that a visit to her breathtakingly imaginative, eye-delighting performance piece, “Astro Boy and the God of Comics,” will set your inner 10-year-old free. (Attention real 10-year-olds: same effect on your inner 8-year-old!)
For this idea-packed 70-minute excursion into the life and work of cartoonist legend Osamu Tezuka, who created the ’60s Japanese robot action hero Astro Boy, Power appropriates the tools of other graphic and creative arts — cartooning, animation, video, drawing, illustration, puppetry — and shows us what it feels like to exert an exuberant control over them all. The piece, performed by eight actors dashing about as if they were cartoon characters over-hydrated on energy drinks, tries out its own act of animation on the spirit of an artist. And it does so in lovingly virtuoso style, the likes of which Washington theater has not encountered.
This may be the show to demonstrate to those whose eyes don’t normally shift for long from their warm, glowing hand-helds that the stage can offer the same sort of mesmerizing captivation. Power, a Georgetown University theater professor who once led a Chicago troupe called Live Action Cartoonists, has her own singular approach to storytelling, which places an exclamation point on the visual but does not entirely neglect the emotional. To watch as her actors draw for you the huddled bodies of Japanese mothers and children awaiting atomic annihilation is to be reminded of the visceral impact made possible by a representational imprint of horror.
When I say draw, I mean the cast actually does. In several scenes, three or four actors pick up markers or charcoal and get to work on small pads, or mural-size pieces of paper hanging from the back wall of Luciana Stecconi’s amazing scenic design, which is made to look like the innards of a TV set. There, they communally compose a caricature of Tezuka, or illustrate an incident from the Astro Boy story.
The drawing is astonishingly quick — that’s part of the fun — but also so compelling for a spectator that you sometimes filter out another key facet of the evening: what the actors are saying. “Astro Boy and the God of Comics” is like a hyper-entertaining college course whose semester has been processed down to an hour and 10 minutes, and woe to those who haven’t kept up with the reading.
The show has a lot of information to impart — about Astro Boy’s origins, Tezuka’s biography, the animation world in general — all of which is integrated into Power’s physical concept. Just as Astro Boy was conceived as a robot yearning for a full-fledged human boyhood, the show constantly mixes cartoon life with our perceptions of dramatic reality. A title card on an easel comes alive with a pair of moving, human lips; a three-dimensional cartoon doll is projected into a cinematic landscape; a story of a cartoonist’s power struggle with a studio conjoins live actors and some primitive technical conventions of animation.
Add to this the fact that “Astro Boy and the God of Comics” consists of 10 episodes unfolded in reverse chronology (beginning with Astro Boy’s hero’s death in 2014, and ending with Tezuka’s birth, in 1928), and you have some potential coherence issues. Though I remember watching the eerily primitive Astro Boy cartoons as a kid in the 1960s, and the character reappeared in movies as recently as the mid-2000s, some theatergoers may lack a context for the themes Power sets out. I suspect the director-playwright may be loath to make any pedestrian alterations to her nonlinear construction, but some additional surrender to the need for biographical clarity, especially, at the show’s outset would be helpful.
As a director, Power is doubtless a motivational dynamo, for she elicits eight performances filled with the joy of participating in the project. Let’s just name the players: Joe Brack, Jamie Gahlon, Lee Liebeskind, Karen O’Connell, Betsy Rosen, JB Tadena, Kristin Watson and Clark Young. Their pleasure activates yours; it’s remarkable how free they’re able to seem, executing unusual tasks that require efficiency under pressure. (As Jon Lovitz used to say: “Acting!”)
Just as noteworthy are Power’s technical associates: It’s as if in this Studio 2ndStage production she’s assembling a kind of studio of her own. In conjunction with the superb contributions of Jared Mezzocchi’s projections and Evan Rogers’s soundscape, the lighting by Andrew Griffin and costumes by Frank Labovitz help to imbue Stecconi’s set with a sense of sci-fi enchantment. The efforts, too, of Alex Thomas, the cartoonist who drilled the actors in rapid-fire sketching, are rewardingly apparent.
The episodes of “Astro Boy and the God of Comics” have unique personalities. Some are funny, some mournful. It’s hard to single out any as the epitome of Power’s inventiveness. But there is something about the way the picture is made to emerge in Episode Seven (“Dr. Boynton’s Only Son Dies in a Traffic Accident”) that underlines the buoyant, poignant acts in which Power and her crew engage here. “KERSMASH!” an actor writes in red pen across the accident scene. As goes the cartoon tragedy, so goes the heart.
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Washington City Paper
Astro Boy and the God of Comics
Created and directed by Natsu Onoda Power
At Studio 2nd Stage to March 11
By Chris Klimek • February 24, 2012
The end is the beginning is the end in Astro Boy and the God of Comics, Natsu Onoda Power’s brisk, vibrant, surprisingly moving sci-fi spectacle-cum-artist biography. Superficially an adaptation of the Atomic Age manga about an empathetic flying Pinocchio built by a scientist to replace his dead son, the show blasts off when its helmet-haired hero does, on a self-sacrificing mission to save us puny humans from a lethal spike in solar radiation.
Does he succeed, or do we all cook? Given the optimistic sensibility of cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, the show’s other title character, our odds seem good, but—SPOILER—we never find out. After quickly establishing the planetary threat via some funny newscasts from a stentorian Joe Brack, the show’s 10 “episodes” glide backward in time. As the piece morphs from the origin story of Astro Boy—powered, as superhero origins must be, by the twin booster rockets of tragedy and altruism—into a loving portrait of the ‘bot-boy’s real-life creator, it steadily gathers emotional resonance to match its technical brilliance and deft ensemble work. It’s a stunner.
We’re told the solar scare has swelled wait lists for offworld retirement colonies. The moon and Mars would seem to be at least as vulnerable to any sun-related problem as Earth, as one talking head points out—maybe people want to go because President Gingrich has granted them statehood. It’s all played for laughs, but to Tezuka, the prospect of a consuming apocalyptic inferno was no joke. Born in 1928, he was a young man when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in 1945. He released his first manga two years later, when he was a medical student. His comics were popular enough that he never practiced medicine, though he kept medical-resident work hours, often sleeping in his studio. Although accessible to kids, his most famous creation pondered the same profound question that has driven so much “adult” sci-fi: If we endow our machine servants with the ability to think and feel, what obligations do we owe them?
Power, a Georgetown University theater professor who expanded her thesis about Tezuka’s seminal manga and anime into a 2009 book, here expertly wields a staggering array of high- and low-tech storytelling tools—video and laser projection, puppetry, choreography, and live cartooning—to weave a kinetic but never assaultive metatextual tapestry.
Save for Astro and Tezuka (Karen O’Connell and Clark Young, respectively), the cast wears zippered flight suits with mission patches featuring the show’s slick logo. Those military-style uniforms could be a nod to the discipline with which they collaborate, particularly when several of them team-sketch a key scene—the computer failure/traffic fatality that claimed the son of Dr. Boynton, Astro Boy’s inventor—in magic marker across a giant paper backdrop. They must be tracing faintly projected lines to all be sketching pieces of the same picture at a consistent scale and perspective, but I was unable to detect any trickery from where I was sitting. (Alex Thomas is the show’s credited cartoonist, with additional compositions from Andy Brommel.) All that matters is that this rapid act of apparent creation is breathtaking to witness, one-upping the much-discussed canvas-priming scene in Arena Stage’s ongoing production of the Mark Rothko study RED. That lumbering blowhard of a play could use a dash of the whimsy that Power brings this one, even as she makes its stakes feel so much higher.
Luciana Stecconi’s clever set design frames the stage with a giant recreation of a vintage console television; its screen is a transparent curtain that reflects Jared Mezzocchi’s judiciously used video projections while still allowing us to see the actors behind it. Sometimes they seem to manipulate the graphics by waving their hands, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. This show, more than most, relies on perfect synchronicity between the actors and the technicians. That it all looks so easy is a testament to the prodigious craft involved.
When Tezuka adapted Astro Boy for television in 1963, the program’s backers insisted it be made on the cheap. Thus animators kept a “bank” from which they could sample pieces of old footage, fashioning new episodes from as few new drawings as possible—a budgetary compromise that evolved into an aesthetic. The ability to rewatch old episodes on demand was a generation off, but attentive viewers still picked up on the recycling.
Astro Boy the play feels lavish by comparison. Even when its visual effects are no more sophisticated than a projected skyscape against which a stick-mounted maquette can be made to soar, it transports us completely into the world of an artist who imagined that science might bring humankind not just a horrifying new scourge, but perhaps a benevolent protector, too. Early in the show, as we watch a team of technicians assemble Astro Boy in a lab that looks like giant microchip, scrolling text briefs us on the abilities that set him apart from other machines. He’s got an IQ of 300, but he can cry, too.
Like Astro Boy, Astro Boy and the God of Comics is an advanced creation with a human soul. No expenditure of imagination has been spared.
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Washingtonian
Theater Review: “Astro Boy and the God of Comics” at Studio Theatre
Natsu Onoda Power takes us inside the world of Japanese manga in this innovative and exciting new show.
By Jane Horwitz
The ingenious new show Astro Boy and the God of Comics, created for Studio Theatre’s experimental wing, Studio 2ndStage, is described in press releases as a “high/low-tech multimedia extravaganza.” And believe it or not, that’s exactly what it is. Truth in advertising—what a concept.
In a fast-moving hour-plus, using actors, still projections, film, puppetry, live drawing, and more, director/creator Natsu Onoda Power cheerfully pulls us into the world of Japanese manga comics and anime (animated film) and the life of the man considered the father of it all, Osamu Tezuka. Structured as a series of ten “episodes,” unfolding in reverse chronological and numerical order, we learn how the young Tezuka, born in 1928 and weaned on his father’s love of movies and his mother’s homemade flip books, started drawing comics while in college and medical school. We learn how in 1952 he invented a robot with an IQ of 300, Tetsuwan Atom (known in the West as Astro Boy)—first as a comic book (i.e., manga) hero, then as the star of his first animated TV series in 1963. We also learn how Tezuka worked his studio assistants to exhaustion, how he sneaked out to see movies while on deadline, how he loved to wear berets, and how he often slept at the studio.
In the show’s first episode, it is the year 2014. A harried TV anchor and his intrepid correspondent inform us that a shower of radiation threatens to destroy Earth. Anyone who’s able is moving to colonies on the moon and Mars. Astro Boy, the robot hero, flies off to detonate a nuclear bomb inside the sun and save Earth. He will be destroyed, but humankind will survive.
Traveling further back in time, we enter the Astro Boy comic book narrative as the character of Dr. Boynton (Power uses the names from the Western versions of the comics) constructs a robot boy to replace his son, who died in an auto accident. The doctor builds Astro Boy in a lab, and then, in a low-tech transmogrification, in walks actor Karen O’Connell as a bionically perky, real-live Astro Boy, taking over from the prop.
Power is an assistant professor of theater at Georgetown University. She directs and designs theater at Georgetown and at professional companies. She staged Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven at Studio’s 2ndStage in 2010 and created the art-evocative sets for Forum Theatre’s bobrauschenbergamerica last year. (She tried to re-create a famous Rauschenberg image by dipping a tire in paint, putting it around her waist, and rolling across the stage.) Power’s PhD thesis and her 2009 book, God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post–World War II Manga, surely inspires this show. Her affection and admiration for her subject and his perhaps insufficiently recognized influence on art and culture is manifest.
Studio 2ndStage’s rough fourth-floor space makes an ideal venue for this multimedia piece. The spare set, designed by Luciana Stecconi, looks like the inside of a computer—gray floor and wall panels, overlaid with white circuitry. This provides a kind of playroom where the actors cavort as Tezuka’s characters.
Then there are the fabulous projections. With translucent curtains and a white wall at the back of the stage, multiple projections can be shown at once—sometimes while the live actors inject themselves or doll/puppets into the image. The projections occasionally take on a 3D depth, which is truly cool. At other moments, the back wall of the set becomes a drawing board on which actors can add ink to projected images, or create their own. Projection designer Jared Mezzocchi has brought Power’s ideas to fruition in a way that’s wholly accessible to us, even if we’re not sure how he’s done it.
The sound design and original music by Evan Rogers add greatly to the SLAM! BAM! SMASH! of the comics sequences and to a sense of nostalgia at quieter moments. Costume designer Frank Labovitz uses exaggeration to great effect, not only in making Astro Boy’s red boots and shiny black cone of hair come to life, but in the way the actors add odd bits to their coveralls to become other characters.
The ensemble cast—Joe Brack, Jamie Gahlon, Lee Liebeskind, Betsy Rosen, JB Tadena, Kristin Watson, and Clark Young, plus O’Connell—bring gobs of energy and wit to this unusual enterprise, getting the heightened tone and the clockwork timing just right under Power’s direction. Young has fun in scenes when he plays the manga master Tezuka.
You don’t have to be a manga maniac or a devotee of anime to enjoy Astro Boy and the God of Comics. What Power has done with this little show is tell the unique yet universal story of an artist and his obsession by yanking you into his work and his world, using every theatrical trick in the book. What a way to travel.
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Artistic Team
Natsu Onoda Power- Director/ Creator
Luciana Stecconi- Set Design
Andrew Griffin- Light Design
Frank Labovitz- Costume Design
Evan Rogers- Sound Design
Jared Mezzocchi- Projections Design
Cast
Joe Brack
Jamie Gahlon
Lee Liebeskind
Karen O' Connell
Betsy Rosen
JB Tadena
Kristin Watson
Clark Young
Osamu Tezuka: A Biography | Trying to Be Human: Astro Boy | Interview with Natsu
Synopsis
A highly visual, retro-sci-fi performance about Astro Boy and its creator Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka is admired as “the God of Manga” in his native Japan for inventing modern manga comics. Initially created in Japan’s post-war era, Tezuka envisioned Astro Boy as an embodiment of a peaceful use of nuclear energy—a robot created by a scientist after the death of his son, an eternal boy with the optimism and innocence to face down any adventures that face him.
Onoda Power’s play combines Tezuka’s life, the history of Japanese animation, and the fictional world of Astro Boy, a crime-fighting boy robot. Astro Boy’s quirky visual style slams against post-WWII fascination with technology and destruction, and the relationship between creator and his work. It is a high /low-tech multimedia extravaganza, featuring on-stage drawing, interactive video, and 1960s-style animation.
Osamu Tezuka
Osamu Tezuka is the Walt Disney of manga. Tezuka was born in 1928 in Toyonaka City in Osaka, Japan. The eldest of three, he grew up reading early manga, the Japanese comics he would come to revolutionize and popularize. In 1946, while studying to be a doctor, he published his first comic strip in the Mainichi School Children’s newspaper, entitled “Diary of Ma-Chan.” Tezuka’s career as a manga artist took off while he was still in medical school. In 1951, he joined the Tokyo Children’s Manga Association and began writing serialized short pieces for Manga Shonen.
His publications with Shonen led to the advent of one of his most popular manga characters, Captain Atom, known in English as Astro Boy. Astro Boy is a loveable robot boy with jet-pack legs and justice-fighting ways. The character, often seen as an autobiographical representation of Tezuka, struggles to navigate the divide between technology and humanity, questioning the peaceful coexistence of humans and robots. In 1963, Tezuka’s famous Astro Boy came to the US in the form of an NBC cartoon. Tezuka’s cute-as-a-button robot soon became an American favorite. In her book on Tezuka, Natsu Onoda Power describes Tezuka’s popularity in the United States:
On the streets of New York, he approaches a group of little boys: “I will give you a dime each if you answer my question…do you know Astro Boy?” One of them answers, “Of course I do, you don’t know it?” Elated, Tezuka jumps up and down exclaiming, “Whoo hoo! How happy I am! Here, take all the money I have!” and throwing the contents of his pockets in the air.
Tezuka’s work has changed the world of manga and anime (animated series drawn by many of the same manga artists and inspired by manga). His style is a benchmark of the genre. He was a graphic novel pioneer: his work made complex characters and plots standard for manga. He popularized the form in the US and Japan, bringing the world over 150,000 pages of comics, as well as several films and short fictions.
—Arianna Gass
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Trying to Be Human: Astro Boy and the God of Comics
Natsu Onoda Power is a director, writer, and designer. As rehearsals for Astro Boy and the God of Comics approach, Literary Director Adrien-Alice Hansel chatted with her about the inspiration behind her newest work, which combines Tezuka’s life, the history of Japanese animation, and the fictional world of his greatest creation: Astro Boy, a crime-fighting boy robot.
AH: You’ve literally written the book on Osamu Tezuka (God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga) and now you’re exploring his life and cartoons theatrically for Studio 2ndStage. Why are you drawn to Tezuka’s work?
NOP: I’ve loved his work since I was a child. He is a genius at borrowing techniques from other art forms, like theatre or film, to make his comics alive and interesting. One of the most interesting things that he does is what he calls the “Star System” — he “casts” his comics from an ensemble of fictional “stars” (really, stock characters) that he has created. It’s like the Star System in film, where an actor brings all kinds of associations with him/her into a character, making the character all the more complex. Tezuka is also a master storyteller. He can create absorbing narratives, but will always pull you back and make you aware that you are reading a comic book. It’s really Brechtian.
What do you hope to explore in the story of Astro Boy?
Astro Boy and the God of Comics combines three narratives — the fictional story of Astro Boy, the story of how the Astro Boy series was created, and the story of the series’s creator, Osamu Tezuka. It’s about a little boy robot who tries to be “human” and fails (and eventually come to terms with his identity... he is a robot and he is proud); it’s about a comic book series that becomes a national icon; it’s about a cartoonist who is admired as the “god of comics”; it’s about a young artist transforming the dehumanization of World War II into something hopeful. It’s really about “trying to be human,” whatever it means in all these different situations. I am hoping to explore this theme in the staging too... what does it mean to be “live theatre with real humans”?
That’s fascinating—the idea of playing with real humans and real action on stage. Astro Boy, like some of your other work, will feature live animation—actors drawing while the audience watches. Why do you think it’s so engaging to watch people draw on stage?
I am obsessed with watching skilled people carrying on a task. I love great acting for that reason, but I also enjoy watching people draw, paint, cook, knit, build things. I once stood outside watching a person spread plaster on a wall on stilts for an hour. It was completely mesmerizing. There is magic to witnessing an object come into existence in front of you. Sort of the same idea as an open kitchen.
You describe this play as a sort of high tech/low tech retro-sci-fi piece. Can you talk a little bit about the aesthetic you’re going after and how you and your design team are hoping to achieve it?
Astro Boy gives us a vision of the “future from the past”... an image of the early 21st Century from the perspective of the 1950s-60s. I just love this. Growing up, I was also obsessed with Tex Avery cartoons from the 50s (“The Farm of Tomorrow,” “Cars of Tomorrow” and the like). It is completely anachronistic. Astro Boy periodically has to “change his vacuum tube” because they sometimes fail... like an old TV. I am trying to do something similar with the staging. We will use video (Jared Mezzochi, who is doing projection design for the show, is the master of high-tech), but mix it with low-tech elements like drawing. It should be clunky and cartoony. Not at all slick. My goal is to make the show look like it was an animation made by Tex Avery or Tezuka in the 50s/60s: “The Theatre of Tomorrow.”
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Astro Boy and the God of Comics, created and directed by Georgetown professor Natsu Onoda Power, combines the life of seminal manga artist Osamu Tezuka with the history of Japanese animation and the fictional world of his greatest creation: Astro Boy, a crime-fighting boy robot. It also features on-stage drawing. Ensemble member Jamie Gahlon spoke with Literary Director Adrien-Alice Hansel about preparing to draw on stage in front of a live audience.
AH: What’s your background in drawing?
JG: I’ve always loved it. Always. When I was a kid, I’d spend hours with our VHS cases, trying to perfect Disney characters. I took a couple of classes over the years, but the only serious course I took was a summer class at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. But I’m a consummate doodler. You can’t stop my pen moving in meetings.
And in performing?
I acted when I was growing up, through high school into college. But at Georgetown I got interested in designing and producing, things that hadn’t been available to me before. I haven’t been on stage in eight years, actually.
So what’s it like drawing on stage?
It’s not like anything I’ve really done before. It’s kind of like learning dance choreography—we’re definitely setting what happens when, sometimes to music, and very tightly timed out. And it’s the opposite of doodling—it’s drawing on a large scale, and really drawing (the audience sees everything I’m doing.) But the thing we’re working with in rehearsal right now is making sure that it’s interesting to watch as well as making the picture that Natsu wants. There’s a lot of technique to cheating out for the audience, making sure that they see how the picture itself is coming together.
And you had a week of drawing boot camp before regular rehearsals, right?
Yeah. And boot camp was fun! (At least it was a lot of fun for me. Some of the ensemble probably hated it a little, if they weren’t as into drawing as I am.) It was led by Alex Thomas, one of the original members of Live Action Cartoonists—a now-defunct Chicago theatre company that Natsu founded along with other Northwestern grads. It was intense—we really are drawing up there. Alex was our master teacher, and we worked with the big drawing board and the projection screen doing drills, basically. We’d see an image and have 10 seconds to draw it. Then 20 seconds. Then a minute and a half. Then 10 seconds again. We started to learn how to draw large enough for the audience to read it. We designed some of the actual images that each of us would be responsible for making—there’s a very important car crash in the play, and I designed the “Car of the Future” that I draw during the show. One of the other ensemble members designed the truck and the truck driver that he draws.
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