Frank Galati adapted “After the Quake’’ from two short stories by Haruki Murakami: “Superfrog Saves Tokyo,’’ in which a giant frog does indeed save Tokyo, and “Honey Pie,’’ in which a man tells bedtime stories to the young daughter of the woman he secretly loves.
Outsize adventure and small-scale domestic bliss: You wouldn’t think these elements would blend naturally onstage. And yet, in Shawn LaCount’s delicate and moving production for Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, they do.
Part of the magic, in fact, comes from the contrast between the styles of the two stories. The intellectually sophisticated frog’s exploits have an almost comic-book quality of exaggeration and mock seriousness - he’s fond of quoting Nietzsche and Conrad - while the young man’s wooing-through-childcare carries an air of fragile sweetness. And Galati skillfully weaves the two together, so at times the storyteller is in fact telling us about the frog, and at other times the actor who plays the frog changes hats to become a narrator and bring us up to date on the young man.
The quake referred to in the title is the catastrophic tremor that struck Kobe, Japan, in 1995, though neither story deals directly with that event; Murakami wrote the whole collection as a sort of challenge to himself, to tell stories that in some way reflected the disaster without recounting it explicitly. But the aftermath of the earthquake infuses both tales: The frog is working to keep a malevolent giant worm from wreaking similar havoc on Tokyo, and the girl needs bedtime stories because she’s having nightmares in which “Earthquake Man’’ tries to stuff her into a tiny box.
And she’s not the only one suffering aftershocks. Junpei, her storyteller, grew up in Kobe and is now estranged from his parents there; he thinks of reconnecting after the quake but doesn’t. Instead he lives an increasingly isolated life in Tokyo that’s relieved only by telling stories to young Sala and her mother, Sayoko, who married Junpei’s best friend instead of him.
We don’t meet that friend, Takasuki, right away, and the complications of the relationships among the three of them are part of the story. But it’s always Junpei we care about most, especially because he’s portrayed with heartbreaking innocence and grace by a young actor named Chen Tang. Tang’s expressive, almost transparent features and irresistible smile draw our sympathy to him even as he’s telling us he’s isolated and unable to make friends.