"The Three Hagi Sisters": A Modern Japanese Play by Nagai Ai

Over the past decade, Nagai Ai has become one of Japan's most beloved and respected playwrights. Her award-winning play "The Three Hagi Sisters", first produced in November 2000, won critical and popular acclaim for its humorous depiction of relations between the sexes and its playful satire of academics using their bedroom frustrations as material for gender research. Nagai's theatrical portrayal of three Japanese sisters living in a small town will remind readers of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" while departing in an entirely new direction. Loren Edelson is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Theatre Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. A recipient of a Japan Foundation fellowship, she is currently doing fieldwork in Japan for her dissertation.