"Junpei’s magical-realist story—about a shy banker who must aid a giant magical-realist frog in combat against a giant magical-realist worm—provides the evening’s play-within-a-play. Galati’s script preserves luxurious passages of Murakami’s (translated) prose, a sensual pleasure as performed by each member of the company. The design team, meanwhile, has created a visual and aural environment to match the haunted elegance of the words: Newspaper pages and homemade missing-persons flyers paper the theater space’s walls, while bits of detritus—plush toys, plastic bottles, 45-RPM records—hang from the ceiling. Ingeniously, when an actor needs a prop, it’s usually hanging just overhead.
Dylan Myers displays an expansive physicality as the frog who summons the banker, Katagiri, on his heroic mission. (If you’ve ever wondered what those thin-soled rubber athletic shoes with individual toes are for, the answer is: amphibian wear.) Maboud Ebrahimzadeh is double-cast as Katagiri and the pal who steals away Junpei’s love. You pity his characters differently. The same prop—a black-lace curtain, basically—convincingly evokes the worm the frog must fight and later, a terrifying hallucination of an insect invasion of Katagiri’s wounded body. It’s strong, stirring stuff—a modern fable with an oblique moral. It enchants us like a dream and kicks like a nightmare."