Plays rarely ask theatregoers to impersonate wild boars. But this past summer, a world premiere at the Davis Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C., did just that. At the beginning of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a dramatization of (improbably enough) Michael Pollan’s nonfiction book about the food chain, actors herded audience members from the seating area to the stage in a tongue-in-cheek wild-boar chase. The quirky production subsequently spun off into interactive playlets in different parts of the Georgetown University building: a mock game show called Meal of Fortune; a faux self-help group, titled Troubled Foods Anonymous; a monologue delivered by an anthropomorphized world-weary salmon. In the show’s finale, a mini-banquet served up locally sourced corn soup.
It was another audacious project from the up-and-coming director, designer and writer Natsu Onoda Power, who doubles as an assistant professor at Georgetown’s Theater and Performance Studies Program.
Since moving to Washington a few years ago from Chicago, where she co-founded the performance art group Live Action Cartoonists, 38-year-old Onoda Power has contributed eye-catching sets and costumes to productions mounted by D.C.-area theatres. As a director and adaptor, at Georgetown and elsewhere, she has drawn on a daringly eclectic range of material to conjure up productions that are provocative, visually arresting and playful.
Revenge of the Poisoned Ladies—seen at the 2008 Capital Fringe Festival—yoked a kabuki narrative to a Victorian ghost story, with the help of puppets, masks, moving cutouts and a mash-up of horror-movie sequences. Madness and Civilization, a 2010 dramatization of the book by philosopher Michel Foucault, showcased French techno-pop dance sequences and interactive games of Mad Libs, as well as nods to 17th-century medical protocols (think leeches and branding irons). Swimmy and Other Stories—mounted at Georgetown, as Madness was—gave a set of children’s books a multimedia adaptation, complete with a blues band.
“She’s doing some of the most exciting work in D.C.,” says David Muse, artistic director of D.C.’s Studio Theatre, where Onoda Power directed Young Jean Lee’s edgy Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven in 2010. Muse characterizes Onoda Power’s trademark aesthetic as “some combination of intellectual rigor, plus design sensibility, plus wild theatrical imagination.”
Expect to find those traits in Astro Boy and the God of Comics, opening at Studio this month, as part of the company’s 2ndStage series. Written and directed by Onoda Power, the show evokes the life, oeuvre and cultural context of the Japanese artist Osamu Tezuka, creator of the famous manga character Astro Boy, an adorable robot. Featuring both videos and actors drawing on stage—modes that were also staples of the Live Action Cartoonists repertoire—the new show displays Onoda Power’s knack for straddling the low-tech/high-tech divide. It also points to her comfort level with both pop culture and scholarship: To the Astro Boy production she brings the expertise she acquired while writing God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post–World War II Manga (University Press of Mississippi, 2009).
That book’s subject, as it happens, is indissolubly linked to her theatre career. In her Georgetown University office one fall afternoon, the quietly ebullient Onoda Power recalled that, as a girl, growing up in Japan’s Mie Prefecture (“the Iowa of Japan,” she quips), she dreamed of being a cartoonist. When she was around 11, she insisted on traveling to Tezuka’s office in Tokyo, where she beseeched the great man to take her on as an assistant.
“He told me that I was too young. And he said, ‘You should go to school, and go see lots of movies and plays and read lots of books—that’s how you become a great cartoonist,’” she remembers.
Following his advice, she started attending theatre with her supportive family; as a middle schooler, she began writing scripts as well. As she got older, she concluded that she didn’t have the talent to be a professional cartoonist (though she still doodles for fun). Instead, she decided, she could apply the approach of Tezuka—whose work brims with references to other art forms—to the stage.
During high school, Onoda Power spent a year as an exchange student in California, and when it came time for college, she opted to return to the U.S. to enroll at Northwestern University, where she studied theatre and printmaking. After completing a yearlong program in scenic painting at Yale School of Drama, she returned to Northwestern to earn a Ph.D. in performance studies.
Her academic chops and creative daring won her a berth at Georgetown, where she earned the admiration of her colleagues. “She’s brilliant,” declares Maya E. Roth, director of the Theater and Performance Studies Program, waxing fervent about Onoda Power’s teaching skills and conceptually intrepid, “visually stunning” productions. “Surprise is just part of the territory with her,” Roth says.
Georgetown professor Derek Goldman sounds a refrain that crops up often in conversations about Onoda Power’s output: Her writerly vision and directorial intuition inform and enhance her design work, and vice versa. In 2010, when Goldman directed Kafka’s Metamorphosis for the acclaimed Synetic Theater, he recruited Onoda Power as scenic and costume designer: Her set played with perspective so that the audience seemed to be peering at Gregor Samsa’s room through the ceiling.
With its disorienting vistas, the set conveyed “the psychological dimension of Gregor’s experience,” Goldman says. He adds that Onoda Power “doesn’t just give you a great visual, but really is thinking about the entire engine of the story.”
“You’re not going to get just scenic design from her: You’re going to get something that moves the project along,” Forum Theatre artistic director Michael Dove concurs. When Dove directed Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest for the Maryland-based company in 2011, Onoda Power’s set turned a black box theatre into a paranoia-infused Eastern European square, guarded by hulking silver statues of Nicolae Ceauşescu. The setup was as dramaturgically powerful as it was visually striking, Dove notes, adding that Onoda Power seems to be able to think across disciplines and conventional job-title boundaries. “I don’t think she has any of those lines in her brain,” he says.
Natsu Onoda Power certainly isn’t worried about lines demarcating what’s traditionally seen as stage-worthy and what’s not. Few of us would see the cerebral writings of French theorist Foucault as prime for the limelight, but to Onoda Power—a fanatical reader and researcher—dramatizing Madness and Civilization made perfect sense.
“People think, ‘Oh, Foucault: I can’t get through a chapter!’” she notes. “But actually, he writes so compellingly and visually.” The topic particularly appealed to her because she has a brother-in-law with a mental illness.
A personal connection also paved the way for Omnivore’s Dilemma, which, like the other Georgetown shows, featured an undergraduate cast. An enthusiastic amateur cook herself, Onoda Power is married to chef Tom Power, who owns and runs a high-end Washington restaurant. Multiple copies of Pollan’s food-themed book have landed in the couple’s home. “People keep giving it to us,” Onoda Power notes wryly.
When she finally read it one weekend, she says, “I was really struck not just by the information that it contains, but by Michael Pollan as a narrator. He’s such a compelling writer! He has a sense of humor and wit that people don’t really talk about when they talk about the book. He stands in manure! He buys a cow! He hunts and gathers for mushrooms! I thought that there was a really strong narrative in that.”
The fact that Pollan’s book is a font of information—about Big Corn, the industrial organic business, and more—did not strike her as problematic.
“I don’t find things entertaining unless there is content, and I don’t think content is palatable unless it’s presented in a theatrically interesting way,” she says. “If some people say, ‘There was so much going on that I couldn’t see all of it; I have to come back and see it again,’ that’s okay with me.”
As was the case with Madness, Onoda Power devised an academic curriculum to dovetail with the Omnivore production. Georgetown students enrolled in the “Spectacle of Eating” course read Roland Barthes, Anthony Bourdain, Richard Schechner, Strindberg’s Miss Julie and D.C. food blogs, among other texts. At one class, a student presentation involved utensil-free tomato eating and milk and malt balls dropping out of suspended bags—a spectacle that provoked a highbrow discussion.
“The act of designing a course isn’t that different from playwriting,” Onoda Power says. “It’s putting together material in a way that’s accessible to people.”
The accessibility level should be high with Astro Boy, which, Onoda Power promises, will feature at least one monster and the onstage construction of a robot from elements of the set.
As for her future plans, she’s mulling over a fantasy project involving historical technologies like magic lanterns and the camera obscura. “I want to be cutting edge by not using video,” she says.The rest of Foucault’s oeuvre offers some tantalizing possibilities, too. “Discipline and Punish,” she muses, referring to the philosopher’s 1975 treatise. “I really want to turn that into a performance.”
Virginia-based arts journalist Celia Wren is a former managing editor of this magazine.
