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We are so accustomed to theater that imitates film-dramas that are screenplays in disguise-that a play that is at once inherently theatrical and imagined as a critique of a film challenges us. The title of Chiori Miyagawa's I Have Been To Hiroshima Mon Amour straightforwardly announces its engagement with Alain Resnais' and Marguerite Duras' 1959 film, and yet it also disorients us. The title might simply be colloquial: "Yes, I have been to Hiroshima Mon Amour; I saw it twenty years ago at the Lincoln in New Haven." But the title also jars its audience by suggesting that the film in itself remains a place one might visit, that Resnais produced not so much a film one can watch but a location one can experience. This double possibility of the title speaks to the play's disruption of a claim to experience embodied by the reception of Resnais' film. For decades, all cinephiles had to go to Hiroshima Mon Amour. But where did they go? What did they see there? What did they miss? Who was missing?
A huge and fascinating body of writing scholarship about trauma and testimony has formed around the haunted places and names and landscapes of World War II. Like much of this scholarly work, Miyagawa's play is concerned with the problem of testimony and the possibility of producing a work of art that does not falsify unimaginable experience, does not make a bogus symbol from traumatic events that do not allow an image to be formed of them. Resnais and Duras were themselves alert to the problem of representing historical trauma; Resnais had made Night and Fog (1955), o ne of the first films about the Holocaust. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima": Miyagawa takes this and a few other lines directly from Duras' screenplay. Like Duras and Resnais, Miyagawa is interested...