By Justin Tedaldi

Every once in a while, we wish that we could be someone else. Someone more intelligent. Someone more charming. Someone more together. But what if, in order to improve your own life, you’d have to become somebody you absolutely hated? This is the premise of I and Me & You and I, an English language play by Japanese-born Michi Yamamura, who makes up one half of this two-woman show which in November capped an eight-date run at the Bleecker Street Theatre.

First staged in Tokyo in 2002 under Yamamura’s direction, I and Me & You and I’s American development came four years later. Laura Hembree and Michael Roberts adapted the original script for a New York reading in the spring of 2006, and Mahayana Landowne helmed the director’s chair for its Off Broadway debut the following year.

The curtain rises on an empty hotel room, the play’s sole setting. Nothing elaborate, save for a bed, sofa, table with some personal effects, and of course, the mini-bar. The door suddenly opens and in crashes a young woman clad in fluffy pink cat ears, who scurries underneath the table. This is Potan. The lights go out, and then a conservative-looking older woman appears. Clutching a homemade noose, she gazes up to the sky. “Again…I failed,” she moans. This is Yoko. So begins the tale of two strangers who at first believe that they have nothing in common but ultimately learn much about each other, discovering similarities that run more than skin deep.

The story: Yoko, a snobbish, suicidal banker (played by Yamamura), hesitantly allows Potan, a fuzoku girl (Emi Ikehara, marvelous) to stay upon learning that she’s recently been beaten by her boyfriend, whom she nevertheless affectionately calls “Asparagus.” The two go from awkwardly knocking back a couple of drinks to locking horns when Potan (a slangy katakana-ized abbreviation of anpontan, or unimportant) breaks into an impromptu karaoke performance with her portable Hello Kitty microphone.

Yoko doesn’t care for Potan’s rendition of Kyu Sakamoto’s international smash “Sukiyaki” and other American pop nuggets. Potan is equally dismayed by Yoko’s reluctance to sing anything at all. The girl reveals that it was once her fondest desire to be a singer, but faith in a bogus producer ended with debts, which led to her current relationship with the “civil servant” nicknamed after an unlikely vegetable. “I’m not a hooker,” Potan purrs to her hostess. “I can see the difference,” Yoko snorts.

Although Potan is caught in an abusive relationship, she points out that she at least has someone. “Part of me likes it when he gets pissed—I get the chills all over,” she sighs. Both have no parents. Potan proudly proclaims herself to be a lady, drawing laughs from both Yoko and the audience. Soon, what starts out as yet another mismatched couple takes an interesting turn. Potan flashes an experimental metamorphosis drug swiped from Asparagus that she claims will enable anyone who drinks it to wife, er, life swap (one of her many malapropisms). Naturally, Asparagus is hunting Potan down for it as she speaks. Initially skeptical about its alleged effects, Yoko’s eyes glimmer when Potan warns that ingestion could be fatal. Unaware that she barged in on what was Yoko’s third failed suicide attempt, the two toast to colorful background visuals of dancing psychedelic flowers before passing out.

Examining their new bodies later, Potan is distressed to look (and smell) old, and wonders aloud about the scars on her new arms. Meanwhile, the morose and reserved Yoko is thrilled to have a second shot at youth, save for the particular undergarments she finds herself in. She reclaims her glasses and fashions some extra clothes to cover up, a remarkable transformation from the bouncy bubbliness the character once displayed. Pawing her new face like a lump of clay, the old Yoko blanches. “Stop distorting myself, I’m going to have wrinkles in strange places!” she snaps.

Potan’s phone then beeps out the theme from The Godfather. It’s Asparagus, and he’s coming. Reluctantly, the ladies must hatch a plan to outsmart him, all while growing accustomed to their new identities, forcing them to view each another in a different light.

Thematically, I and Me & You and I is about the decisions these women have made in life, and will now choose to make following their chance encounter. While the duo comes from opposite ends of the spectrum, their Japaneseness magnifies the gap, both social and generational. These are two people—both poles apart and exiles on the fringes of their own groups—who would associate with each other only in desperation. Yoko’s scorn for Potan is white-hot at first, showing no signs of mellowing until the realization that she too is guilty of making the same mistakes in life. “I hate women like you who have no sense of reason,” she hisses. “It’s okay, I like you anyway,” her charge chirps, the trust of youth. In another poignant scene, Potan encourages the gloomy Yoko (in her new young body) to be a bird and fly. “How can a turkey fly?” she scoffs.

A noted television, film and theater actress (she is a veteran of NHK and Fuji TV programs and also appeared in Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale), Yamamura’s dialogue is finely tuned, with humor injected in the right spots to keep the melodrama at bay. Ikehara, another Japanese-in-New York transplant, makes her theatrical debut here and nails the pair’s distinct personalities without sinking into parody. The two heroines are first introduced as failures of sorts, unable to live respectable lives. But as they peel back the layers and pride crumbles under honesty, they discover redemption, which can occur only by walking in (and criticizing) each other’s shoes while facing some hard truths. “My tree of life has only one branch, and it’s rotten,” Yoko gripes at one point. Yes, but the tree can still survive.

I and Me & You and I is a production of Gorgeous Entertainment Inc. For more information, visit www.gorgeousentertainment.com.