After the success of Portrait of Dora as a Young Man, some of Stolen Chair's founding members moved to New York and began to create our next work, Fair Ladies at a Game of Fortune, an original adaptation of Chikamatsu Monzaemon's Bunraku masterpiece, Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards.
Stolen Chair's unique adaptation drew on the performance traditions of shadow puppetry and Bunraku, fusing them to transform actors into puppets into silhouettes cut from the pages of 17th century Japanese woodblock prints. An ensemble of four actresses performed all twelve roles, inverting the all-male casts of Chikamatsu's day. The company continues to conduct workshops in the technique of Human Puppetry developed for this show.