These days, it’s rare to see a new evening-length, two-act play or musical. Most of the new works arriving on regional theater stages are about 90 minutes long. Audiences love them, particularly post-pandemic, and these shows can be less expensive for theaters to produce if they have smaller casts.
Enter “Empty Ride,” a world premiere comedy-drama that opened Thursday at the Old Globe. Written by UC San Diego MFA grad Keiko Green, it’s a jam-packed 90-minute ghost story with five actors playing multiple characters and minimal but effective scenic design.
Globe audience first experienced Green’s work two years ago in her hilarious and touching one-act “Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play.”
Like “Exotic Deadly,” “Empty Ride” is a play with supernatural elements about a flawed but lovable young woman of Japanese descent struggling to find her own identity as well as her place in the wider world.
And like “Exotic Deadly,” it also focuses on a segment of global culture that few American playwrights have explored as well as Green. But “Empty Ride” feels unfocused. There are too many characters and too many subplots for a one-act play.
The play is set in 2016 in Ishinomaki, Japan, a town that lost more than 3,400 people in the tsunami that followed the 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake in 2011.
Kisa, a directionless college art student studying painting in Paris, returns home to care for her dying and widowed father and take over his taxi business to pay mounting bills. While driving, Kisa reconnects with her fun-loving childhood sweetheart, Toru, and she experiences a terrifying “empty ride.” In real life, many Ishinomaki taxi drivers have reported ferrying ghost engers who were victims of the tsunami.
As Kisa, Michele Selene Ang crafts a emotionally closed-in character who is all sharp edges, but has a soft heart. Playing Toru, her romantic interest, is the affable Major Curda, who is everything Kisa is not — loose-limbed, playful and joyous. Jojo Gonzalez is endearing and funny as Kisa’s grieving father, Isamu (as well as Isamu’s no-nonsense brother). Versatile Jully Lee plays multiple characters, including Toru’s business-minded sister Sachiko. And David Rosenberg subtly underplays Alex, an American ex-pat who’s haunted by ghosts of his own.
Director Sivan Battat’s in-the-round production benefits greatly from Avi Amon’s original music and sound design, which helps Battat create an eerie sonic world where Kisa can hear the echoes of her folk music-loving mother, who died in the tsunami, the haunting ring of singing bowl and a ghost enger’s unearthly howl.
Nearly 20,000 people died and $360 billion in damages were caused by the 2011 disaster and it changed the way many coastal Japanese residents live today.
It’s a huge topic to tackle, and “Empty Ride” feels like a play that has tried to cover too much ground. A side plot about the city’s post-tsunami redevelopment and an American’s misplaced guilt feel extraneous. And the characters of the American, a bar hostess and Kisa’s uncle are unnecessary.
There is a nice little ghost story in there and a character, Kisa, who audiences will want to root for. They just need more space to grow in this short, but very busy play.
‘Empty Ride’
When: 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through March 2
Where: Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, the Old Globe, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $31 and up
Phone: 619-234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org
