On the set of her new production, Astro Boy and the God of Comics, creator and director Natsu Onoda Power is full of abounding energy, tempered by disciplined focus.
Watching silently as the script unfolds before her, Power intermittently gets onstage and goes through the movements herself.
“Can you tap dance?” she asks across the stage, as props are moved, chairs scrape, and the projector flickers between slides.
“Some,” the actor replies.
“Great! We’ll have to fit that in somehow,” she says enthusiastically, then sits back at her desk to scribble down a note.
The stage is small and rough, with low lighting, an exposed brick-and-pipes wall, and a concrete floor littered with the organized chaos of a production. In the midst of laughter and the occasional missed line, there is a quieter process taking shape. Onoda Power’s collaborative style dominates the scene.
Power joined the Georgetown theater department in 2005 as an assistant professor, and has contributed to the program in various ways since then, including a highly acclaimed adaptation of The Omnivore’s Dilemma this past summer, for which she served as director.
Her background includes a mixture of performance art and traditional studio art, with a Ph.D in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and a certificate in Technical Design and Production from the Yale School of Drama among her many credentials.
Her technical skill is evident in both her productions and in her teaching. “She would teach us how to watercolor…[along with] all these great technical skills,” Lorrie Damerau (COL ‘13), a physics and theater double major, said about Onoda Power’s set design class.
Swedian Lie (COL ’13), a studio art and theater major, said that her call to bring painting skills to an audition is one of the things that initially attracted him towards Onoda Power’s work. “I thought, ‘This is interesting. I really want to meet this person.’ And from that point on I’ve just been following her,” he said.
Theater and Performing Arts Department Program Director Maya Roth says Onoda Power has managed to garner quite a following. She attributes much of Onoda Power’s appeal to her “collaborative spirit.”
“It’s her charisma, and she’s gifted, she’s brilliant,” Roth said. “The students who repeatedly work with her—there’s this creativity and visual awareness.”
Looking at her productions, creativity and visual awareness are two qualities that Onoda Power clearly harnesses in abundance, not only in more concrete forms such as set design, but also in terms of her creative process. She is known for using projections and manipulating the stage space to integrate the audience into the show.
For The Omnivore’s Dilemma, adapted from Michael Pollan’s book about the food industry, she created small exhibitions throughout the theater as part of the performance.
Astro Boy—adapted from the popular manga series—employs similar stylistic elements. The set functions as a backdrop for the striking centerpiece: a screen of white paper onto which actors trace projected images and draw their own backgrounds to help shape the story.
Around the muted gray side panels, there are clear white lines reminiscent of robot parts, quietly adding another layer of immersion in the story for the audience. This type of subtle symbolism and humor is something that Onoda Power is fond of, as Hunter Styles, (COL ’08), who now works at the Studio Theater, recalls from his experience working with Onoda Power as an undergraduate.
“This is a small thing, but the wallpaper on the set for Kafka’s Metamorphoses…the bedroom where Gregor Samsa changes into an insect…had a really lovely, intricate…hand-painted wallpaper in the room with a fleur-de-lis pattern, but when you looked closely at the wallpaper, some of the fleur-de-lis were actually scarabs.”
Styles said Onoda Power’s sense of humor is often palpable in her work. “Natsu gets inherently that humor is a great way to bring an audience together,” he said. “So even with pieces that touch on grave subjects…humor turns out to be a great way to bring people into that… And it’s like salt on your food—it’s very different from the source material but it brings out the flavor of the original.”
Onoda Power’s work is full of adaptations— last summer’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Foucalt’s Madness in Civilization, and most recently Astro Boy. Unlike her previous works—which are direct adaptations—this final production weaves together the story of the comic’s creator with the story of the character Astro Boy.
Adapting nonfiction into an exciting stage play may seem like a daunting task fraught with mistranslations. However, Onoda Power’s process fluidly translates works from the page to the stage.
“I don’t think I ever sit around like, ‘Oh, how am I going to adapt this?’” she says. “For instance, reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I really loved the book, and it sort of presented itself to me…it kind of unfolds. You get an image or two, and then you have to fit the rest of it in.”
Astro Boy and the God of Comics, the basis of her current production, played an influential role in the formation of her career. “I actually wanted to be a cartoonist,” Onoda Power said. “I loved Osamu Tezuka’s [the creator of Astro Boy] work as a child…[Astro Boy] has really permeated the Japanese culture.”
Her adaptation is cognizant of the work’s influence on its vast readership’s career paths. “When you talk to [Japanese] scientists, and ask why they wanted to become scientists, they say ‘Oh, I wanted to make Astro Boy,’” she said. “I think it’s important and interesting to tell a story of Astro Boy in that context.”
Onoda Power’s students have said that her talent for conveying messages to the audience makes her high art concepts deeply accessible. “I think high school students, even, can understand immediately what she’s after,” Jeremy Guyton (COL ’12) said. Guyton worked with Onoda Power on his senior thesis, The BI(G) Life: Ambiguous Attractions, among other works.
“The audience becomes fascinated with what they’re seeing, because nine-to-ten it’s not something they’ve seen before,” Production Manager and Associate Producer for Georgetown theater Ted Parker said. “And the way she does that, it encourages you to think about what she’s doing.”
Onoda Power’s colleagues and students hesitate to pin a certain aesthetic on her. “I can’t think of anything that [her performances] really have in common,” Roth said. “A lot of projections, a lot of presenting things off of what you expect. Her work is so varied.”
In fact, one of the hallmarks of Onoda Power’s style is originality. “She really pushes the boundary…it’s not just people talking onstage,” Lie said.
“You know the expression ‘think outside the box’? She doesn’t know that there is a box,” Parker said.
When she considers her approach to a production, she doesn’t often bring scripts, but rather comes equipped with large ideas to be filled out by her actors. It all goes back to the process of relaying the important aspects of the production to the audience. “She thinks about what she wants to do, and then she figures out a way to do that,” Parker explained.
Her teaching style fosters an interdisciplinary approach to theatre. “Our majors who have been double majors with studio art—Natsu is their locus,” Roth said. “What she’s doing aesthetically is very distinctive in the program. What she’s doing philosophically is very in company with the program.”
Her directing and designing go hand in hand when it comes to creating pieces of art. “Basically, being a designer makes you a better director, being a director makes you a better designer,” Parker said. “It’s just the more understanding you have of the different disciplines involved, the more likely you’ll be better at your job.”
Onoda Power herself said that she finds her students’ penchant for interdisciplinary study particularly engaging. “What’s really unique about Georgetown’s theater program is that it draws students from all different areas of study,” she said. “You get students from many different departments, and they bring their interests with them.”
She describes her interaction with these students as a collaborative process. “We have psychology majors who are adapting psychology texts into performance, and things like that. That really inspires me. It’s kind of like getting to know different areas through them.”
Once she is exposed to an area of study, Onoda Power tends to become engrossed in the project. As she put it, “I get into these obsessive phases.”
“Last year I was really obsessed with Victorian thrillers—I read like fifty of them in a year,” she said. “I think whatever project I’m working on, that’s what I gravitate to. When I work on a project it kind of consumes my life…I stumble upon [topics for projects] more often than I have projects.”
In keeping with her trend of absorbing facets of her work, Onoda Power says that Georgetown’s focus on social justice has discernibly influenced her own interests. “Students are really interested in activist theater and theater for social change, which is really great to see,” she said. “And that’s an area that’s definitely grown in me since I came to Georgetown.”
She recounts a story of a high school student she encountered while conducting workshops in D.C. as part of a class with Georgetown students. Reading the short plays of an aspiring playwright, she was overcome with emotion.
“I started crying,” she said. “The scenes were moving, but also just the fact that they were these handwritten little notes. All she does in her free time is to write these plays that may never get perused.”
She was moved not just by the content of the plays, but also the writer’s potential. “And I had a moment like if somebody just…gave her a computer—taught her how to edit them and put them into a coherent one-act format—could this be her life?”
On an empathetic note, she added, “I’m really fortunate that something I chose to do in my life has actually become my occupation.”
Her colleagues describe her as collaborative, open-minded, and resourceful—able to work with the skill sets of the team she has in order to bring a special flavor to each performance.
Teamwork is most apparent is in her teaching. Both former and current students laud her encouraging creative process. “She’s one of those professors…you respect them so much, and are inspired to do your best work,” Damerau said, pointing to how unpredictability characterizes her teaching style. “She gets this creativity out of you that you didn’t even know you had.”
Both Styles and Damerau recounted exercises in class that pushed the limits of their creativity. “We created our own one-page panel…we were given five or six images, certain lines of text, and we had to make a story out of it,” Styles said.
Guyton echoed this sentiment, perhaps recalling their collaboration on his senior thesis. “She has this really great way of posing options without saying, ‘This would be better,’” he said. “I would come in with my ideas and my stories, and then we’d talk about them…she definitely allows it to be my material and my words and my stories, but she tweaks it a bit, but in ways that come organically from me and from how I function.”
Observing from the sidelines of the set of Astro Boy, which opens Feb. 15 at Studio Theater, it becomes clear that her easygoing, collaborative style pervades the practical side of her work. But students say that’s one of her greatest assets as a professor as well. As Styles put it, “She will allow you to be creative on your own terms.”
