Chiori Miyagawa

EPIC PLAYS: Volume 2 edited by Emily Mendelsohn and Chiori Miyagawa gathers four contemporary plays: I CAME TO LOOK FOR YOU ON TUESDAY by Chiori Miyagawa; THE SINGING: a cyberspace opera, by Lenora Champagne and Daniel Levy; DISPATCHES FROM (A)MENDED AMERICA by Brandt Adams and Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. and the multi-author collaboration entited ENFANTS PERDUS by Frontera. This 2nd volume of Epic Plays from NoPassport Press is part of the Dreaming the Americas Series.

EPIC PLAYS, Volume 1 edited by Emily Mendelsohn and Chiori Miyagawa gathers wide-ranging dramatic works for big casts and many locations - BOOK OF TINK Erik Ehn, THE (*) INN David Herskovits, THIS LINGERING LIFE by Chiori Miyagawa and THE ORPHAN SEA by Caridad Svich that explore the mercurial nature of human life in its relationship to myth, story-telling, nature and the environment. A collection from NoPassport Press' Dreaming the Americas Series.

The seven plays that comprise Chiori Miyagawa's "Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays" explore themes of memory and identity. Her plays combine poetic language with harsh reality, and time and space are fluid in the worlds she creates - they converge and separate while the characters inhabit many dimensions at once with ease. In one way or another, the heroes and heroines of these plays are outsiders - emotionally (as in "Awakening"), physically (as in "Comet Hunter") or socially (as in "Broken Morning"), and the line that separates life and death is thin. In the title play, a woman in New York City begins to live in the world of a thousand-year-old Japanese memoir that she is reading. The characters in "Leaving Eden" enter, exit, and re-enter Anton Chekhov's Russia from 1887 to 1904, only to end up at a wedding reception in 2005 in New York where Chekhov appears and takes a seat at a table. Inspired by the 1899 Kate Chopin novella of the same name, "Awakening" follows Edna in her journey toward death, through fragmented childhood memories and visions of freedom. "Red Again" begins after "Sophocles'" Antigone dies. She lands in Buddhist bardo, contemplating the history of human violence.

ANTIGONE PROJECT is a play in five parts by Tanya Barfield, Karen Hartman, Chiori Miyagawa, 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, and Caridad Svich that reconsiders the story of Antigone from a variety of rich and radical perspectives. With a preface by dramatist Lisa Schlesinger and an introduction by classics scholar Marianne McDonald, this is a unique addition to contemporary drama.