Yoroboshi

Puncture the plastic skin, shatter the glass eyes, snap them in half — they can’t feel a thing. Can they? Satoko Ichihara, one of Japan’s most uncompromising playwright-directors, makes her greatly anticipated American debut with Yoroboshi, a queer refashioning of the centuries-old Japanese moral tale of a blind boy abandoned by his father. In trash-Barbie cosplay, a lone tayu (narrator) voices every role in a household of the discarded — a sex doll, a mannequin, a traffic dummy — over the unearthly sounds of biwa lute and electronics, while puppeteers drag them through a grotesquely comic tale of love, desire, illness and violence. This is a puppet theater stripped of its innocence: Ichihara’s ruthless, intimate work will cradle you like one of her dolls — and then break you. Yoroboshi is performed in Japanese with English supertitles.