Oriza Hirata

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Shortly after beginning his career as a playwright, Oriza Hirata has had a prolific international career—both touring his work around the world, as well as staging foreign playwrights work at his own theater in Japan.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Hirata's work started to garner international attention. With the help of Japan's Saison Foundation, a grant-making foundation that supports Japanese Theater, and Manhattan's Nonprofit organization Japan Society, Hirata's most famous work, Tōkyō Notes was debuted in the United States in October 2000 in New York City. Japan Society's theater series, Japanese Theatre NOW, has helped bring a number of contemporary Japanese dramas to the United States, Hirata's being notable since Tōkyō Notes was one of the first.

Hirata's first play, Citizens of Seoul (ソウル市民 , Seoul shimin) , first premiered in 1989, and has remained one of his most famous plays. 6 Years later, in 1994, he debuted Tōkyō Notes (東京ノート , Tōkyō nōto) , which is still considered his magnum opus. As a playwright, Hirata has continued to write and direct plays both at Komaba Agora theater, as well as theaters in Europe, the Americas, and other parts of Asia. He is also known for doing international collaborations both in Japan and all around the world, where he has worked with a multitude of playwrights and artists to introduce his own work to new audiences, as well as introduce foreign work to Japan.

Oriza Hirata graduated from International Christian University as a part of their Humanities division. In 1983, he formed the Seinendan Theater Company, which he established in order to practice contemporary colloquial theater. In 1984, Seinendan settled into using the Komaba Agora Theater as their main base of operations. Hirata remains as the theater's primary artistic director and has continued to play a major role in the theater's management.

Contemporary colloquial theater is a theatrical style Oriza Hirata founded as an answer to the “boisterous and festive nature of 1980s Japanese theater.” This style emphasizes colloquial Japanese language use that is designed to sound distinctly typical of the linguistic tendencies and patterns of everyday Japanese speaking. As a result, his plays oftentimes feature multiple characters talking at once, sentence fragments, inaudible speech, and an understated, "normal" speaking tone. This style informs his plays stylistically, both in language and plot, in the sense that Hirata emphasizes realism throughout. However, Hirata has preferred his own stylistic title of "contemporary colloquial theater" because he thinks that relatable terms like Shingeki or realism "sounded too much like the Western drama that [they] emulated." Hirata's style is partially due to his identification the impact of Western style was having on Japanese arts. As a reaction, he has sought to create an artistic style more representative of typical Japanese language and culture. As a playwright, he founded the Seinendan theater company in 1983 as a way to push his acting style into the greater Japanese and international theatre scenes. Hirata has worked closely with international actors when translating his work to preserve the Japanese identity of the speech, which has particularly resonated with French audiences. This style also tends to emphasize a small, intimate set of characters—usually represented by the actors playing the role of a family—to serve as a “microcosm of Japanese society as a whole.” Japanese theater scholar, M. Cody Poulton, describes Hirata's style as an emphasis of the Greek idea of ethos, "the prevalent tone of sentiment of a people or community; the genius of an institution or system."

Oriza Hirata (平田オリザ , Hirata Oriza, born on 8 November 1962, in Tokyo) is a Japanese playwright, director, and academic. For the majority of his life, he has been best known for his work in theater and creating what he has coined, “contemporary colloquial theater,” or as theater critics call it, “quiet drama.”