This country’s most prestigious award for new playwrights is named for the playwright who promoted modernist techniques in plays like Old Toys and Paper Balloon. For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this country whose New Theatre movement railed against traditional styles of plays like kabuki and noh.
ANSWER: Japan
[10h] Kishida Award-winning playwright Toshiki Okada created a modern adaptation of this author’s play Friends. Hippie Boy is nearly hit by the title object in a play by this author from a trilogy that includes A Suitcase and The Cliff of Time.
ANSWER: Kobo Abe (The play is The Man who Turned into a Stick.)
[10m] Yoshiyuki Fukuda’s modernized jidaigeki play The Brave Records of the Sanada Clan was stylistically inspired by this 14th-century Japanese epic about the conflict between the Tara Clan and Minamoto clan.
ANSWER: The Tale of the Heike (“HAY-keh”) [or Heike Monogatari; accept The Tales of the Heike]
<JF, World Literature>