---

"You from Old Stars" is a poetic, darkly comic, and surreal play set in a damaged future where Earth is marked by meteorite strikes, exhaustion, and displacement. In this fractured world, humans and aliens alike struggle to survive, searching for energy, escape, and some fragile sense of connection.

One of the play’s main settings is an underground labor facility in Niigata, where workers are forced to generate electricity by pedaling bicycles. Among them is a blind man who speaks in riddles, jokes, and sudden philosophical reflections. Though trapped inside a brutal system, he continues to imagine the world in vivid, unexpected ways. There he meets MARUME, an alien overseer who watches the workers and speaks in poems, fragments, and songs. Their conversations become one of the emotional centers of the play. Awkward, tender, and strange, their exchanges circle around light, memory, home, and what it means to keep living in a broken world.

Elsewhere, two alien-like beings, B and C, drift across Earth, doing yoga as a ritual to connect with the universe. Their casual, often funny conversations about warp travel, danger, and death reveal a deep sense of alienation. At one point, one of them says they want to become transparent, suggesting a longing not only to escape but to disappear.

Another strand follows D and E, two travelers aboard a spaceship heading toward Earth. Their conversation, comic and unsettling at once, turns on whether D is already dead and what will happen upon arrival. As they argue through the logic of death, labor, and survival, they come up with an absurd and disturbing plan to power their journey through generators and human effort. Their exchanges blur the line between the ridiculous and the horrifying.

The play also introduces a Zanulian couple on their honeymoon, lost in space and running out of fuel. Their domestic, humorous argument adds another tone to the play, while their eventual collision with D and E’s ship reinforces the sense that this universe is governed by drift, accident, and fragile momentum rather than order.

Threaded through the action is “Radio Unconsciousness,” a street performance in Tokyo where young people recite poems into the darkness. These moments expand the play’s world beyond individual characters, giving voice to a collective loneliness, beauty, and persistence.

As meteorites continue to fall and spaceships lose control, the separate lives of the play begin to intersect. A crash-landing in Tokyo creates a moment of encounter between beings who had seemed worlds apart. Yet the play resists a neat resolution. Instead, it ends with the haunting persistence of labor and longing.

Blending speculative fiction, absurdist humor, and lyrical language, "You from Old Stars" is a meditation on survival, exploitation, displacement, and the desire to return home—even when home may no longer exist.

A haunting, poetic journey through a fractured world, where survival and longing echo beyond the stars.

---

Cast: Ryo KANEKO, Mao YAMASAKI, Kokoro WATANABE, Hitomi TOTSUKA

English Translation: Midori OKUYAMA

Lighting: Haruka OGAWA, Minami ITO

Sound: Mei KOJIMA

Production Manager: Eiho Yamaguchi, Aoi UEJIMA

Subtitle operator: Mio GOTO

Support staff on-site: Marin NASU

Producer: College of Arts, Nihon University