Oriza Hirata

is a Japanese playwright, director, and academic. For the majority of his life, he has been best known for his work in theater and creating what he has coined, “contemporary colloquial theater,” or as theater critics call it, “quiet drama.”

Career Oriza Hirata graduated from International Christian University as a part of their Humanities division. In 1983, he formed the Seinendan Theater Company, which he established in order to practice contemporary colloquial theater. In 1984, Seinendan settled into using the Komaba Agora Theater as their main base of operations. Hirata remains as the theater's primary artistic director and has continued to play a major role in the theater's management.

Hirata's first play, , first premiered in 1989, and has remained one of his most famous plays. 6 Years later, in 1994, he debuted ,

Hirata worked at Obirin University for six years as a professor in their theater department before moving onto Osaka University, where he works in their communication-design and robotics departments.

Contemporary colloquial theater

Contemporary colloquial theater is a theatrical style Oriza Hirata founded as an answer to the “boisterous and festive nature of 1980s Japanese theater.” Hirata's style is partially due to his identification the impact of Western style was having on Japanese arts. As a reaction, he has sought to create an artistic style more representative of typical Japanese language and culture. As a playwright, he founded the Seinendan theater company in 1983 as a way to push his acting style into the greater Japanese and international theatre scenes. This style also tends to emphasize a small, intimate set of characters—usually represented by the actors playing the role of a family—to serve as a “microcosm of Japanese society as a whole.”

Hirata has participated in designing university classes that emphasize the communication environment for different fields in order for them to perform more successfully. There are design elements and organizational elements that can encourage better communication in the doctor’s office, such as the positions of the doctor’s and the patient’s chairs, the color of the walls, the lighting, and these elements can create an environment that encourages the patient to ask the doctor questions and bring out answers that can reduce medical/diagnostic error. — Hirata Oriza

International work and acclaim

Shortly after beginning his career as a playwright, Oriza Hirata has had a prolific international career—both touring his work around the world, as well as staging foreign playwrights work at his own theater in Japan.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Hirata's work started to garner international attention. With the help of Japan's Saison Foundation, a grant-making foundation that supports Japanese Theater, and Manhattan's Nonprofit organization Japan Society, Hirata's most famous work, Tōkyō Notes was debuted in the United States in October 2000 in New York City. Japan Society's theater series, Japanese Theatre NOW, has helped bring a number of contemporary Japanese dramas to the United States, Hirata's being notable since Tōkyō Notes was one of the first.

Since then, Hirata's work and company have traveled much of the world, including France, Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Korea, China, Australia, and Brazil. Hirata says that he believes he has "done the best work in France," where "the people in France have been very enthusiastic about [his] work." Both in France and Belgium, Hirata has collaborated with international actors and directors to bring his theatrical work to an international audience, as well as creating new commissioned work as both a playwright and director. The event happened that the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. Hirata's play, entitled "Sayonara II", tells the story of a partially-broken robot who is asked to read poems to the people who died after the disaster.

Accolades

39th Kishida Prize for Drama for his play Tōkyō Notes (1995). 5th Yomiuru Theater Outstanding Director Award for producing Masataka Matsuda's play The Cape of the Moon (1998). 9th Yomiuri Theater Award for Outstanding Production on his play Attacking Ueno Zoo for the Fourth Time (2002). Association Internationale des Critiques des Théâtre Critique Award for his book Arts as the Basis of a Nation (2002). Winner of the Grand Prix of the 2nd Asahi Performing Arts Awards for his play Across the River in May (2003). Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award (2006).

List of works

Major works 1989: : One of Hirata's earliest and most critically acclaimed works, Citizens of Seoul tackles Japan's superiority complex over Korea during their colonization. 1994: : Hirata's most famous and praised work around the world, Tōkyō Notes takes place in a museum where a number of people's personal lives are examined in order to gain a fuller picture of the political, social, and cultural context of a near-future Japan. 2002: : Summarizing the world's history post-WWII, this is one of Hiraza's most grand dramas in terms of scope. Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin are the only 3 characters in the play.

Recent works 2009: 2009: 2009: 2008: 2008: 2008: 2008: 2007: 2007:

Other notable works 2005: 2005: 2003: 2003: 2002: 2001: 2000: 2000: 1999: 1999: 1999: 1999: 1998: 1997: 1997: 1997: 1997: 1996: 1996: 1996: 1995: 1994: 1994: 1992: 1992: 1992: 1992: 1991: 1991: 1991: 1990: 1990: