Help! I Need Somebody.(Review)

Going home is never easy. For Akio Kanzaki, the brooding Japanese salaryman in Ai Nagai's new stage drama "Hello, Mother," the experience proves downright unnerving. Seeking a place to "take off my tie" and relax, he returns to his childhood home in downtown Tokyo--and finds it utterly transformed. Mistaking him for an intruder, the perky Chinese coed from next door blasts him with mace. In the parlor, an elderly professor sits too comfortably and sips tea from a cup he keeps in the pantry. Akio's mother swirls in wearing a backpack and trendy clothes and looking 20 years younger than the apron-clad widow he last visited two years ago. He realizes the man is his mom's lover. "You've dyed your hair brown," he observes. "It's been that way for a while," answers his mother, Fukue. "I'm thinking of changing it to blond."

Nagai's comedy mines the rubble of Japan's failed "miracle" economy through the lives of a mother and son who eventually reconnect. Mom, one of Tokyo's fast-growing "silver generation," lives each day fully. She does volunteer work, takes classes on the classic novel "Tale of Genji" and socializes with a bevy of friends. Meanwhile, Akio, the quintessential corporate warrior, has fallen on hard times. His marriage is failing and his company has begun layoffs. In desperation, he reaches out to the only person he has left: a mother he rarely visits. As their contrasting lives intertwine, they begin to redress the alienation that divided them--and much of Japan--during the boom years, and come to understand one another's struggles. And they do it with a sense of humor. "A mature comedy is born," raved the Asahi Shimbun when the drama opened at Tokyo's New National Theater on March 12. "The play offers both laughter and the heart-rending pain of living."

Clearly the Japanese are ready to confront their tough times, at least through actors on a stage. "Hello, Mother" has been playing to sellout crowds and has generated lively discussion around Tokyo. Many salarymen identify with Akio, who manages the personnel department at an unnamed Japanese automobile company, and thus is responsible for "restructuring" colleagues out of jobs--a fate, he knows, that will someday be his own. Traumatized by this task and increasingly ...