This Philly play about a struggling bookstore is helping real bookstores

A play about a fictional struggling bookstore is trying to help Philadelphia’s real struggling bookstores.

The small but scrappy theater company Tiny Dynamite has opened its production of “Meet Murasaki Shikibu Followed by Book Signing, and Other Things,” a comedy by Julia Izumi about the Japanese woman who wrote what is considered the first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” circa 1000 A.D.

Through a supernatural miracle the play never bothers to explain, Murasaki appears in contemporary times for an interview and book signing for her thousand-year-old novel. She has the ego of someone who has been revered for half a millenia.

Even more miraculous, the celebrity writer decides to drop in on Parchment Books, a small, second-generation family bookstore run by a young woman, Yue Han, who is in over her head.

“This situation is high stakes for her,” said Tiny Dynamite artistic director KC MacMillan. “She has lost a lot of her staff because she hasn’t been able to afford to keep them. The staff she has isn’t reliable, probably for the same reason. That’s why she’s here alone when the play begins. So getting Lady Murasaki Shikibu here to her bookstore is a make-or-break moment for her.”

“Meet Murasaki Shikibu” premiered in 2016 for the New York Fringe Festival. This production at the Drake Theatre in Philadelphia is its first since then.

Tiny Dynamite had originally planned to produce the play in 2021 inside an actual bookstore. MacMillan had struck up an arrangement with People’s Books and Culture, aka Penn Book Center in West Philadelphia on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, to give the play an air of authenticity.

“It was a perfect choice for setting the play because it was quite large for a bookstore and they had a lot of flexibility,” MacMillan said. “They were going to be able to accommodate the 50 people a night that come to Tiny Dynamite shows. It would have been perfect.”

It would have been perfect.

The Penn Book Center had announced it would shut down in 2019, citing online competition from Amazon. But due to fans rallying behind it the store got airborne again: It was acquired by new owners and renamed People’s Books and Culture.

But the concept lasted less than a year. In 2020 the store once again announced it would close, this time citing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. This time the closing stuck for good.

Penn Book Center was not the only retail causality of the pandemic. Other prominent bookstores like Joe Fox and Shakespeare and Co. in Rittenhouse Square also went out of business.

When the pandemic lifted enough to allow Tiny Dynamite to plan for in-person theater again, “Meet Murasaki Shikibu” and the loss of bookstores were still at the top of MacMillan’s mind.

“Carrying that sorrow with us led us to think of the ways in which even our small company, Tiny Dynamite, can shine a light, shout into a megaphone to say, ‘Hey, Center City, West Philly, the neighborhoods of Philadelphia are losing our bookstores,’” she said. “This is a crime.”

Tiny Dynamite is partnering with area bookstores to promote them during the run of “Meet Murasaki Shikibu.” Five bookstores — Uncle Bobbies (Germantown), Inkwood (Haddonfield, NJ), House of Our Own (West Philly), A Novel Idea (South Philly), and The Spiral Bookcase (Manayunk) — are named in the play’s marketing materials and email blasts that go out to thousands of Tiny Dynamite subscribers.

In the lobby of the Drake Theatre’s Louis Bluver stage are displays of the bookstores, and Tiny Dynamite printed bookmarks representing each store for anyone to take home.

Audiences to the theater enter the black box stage through a storefront façade for the fictional Parchment Books constructed inside the space, and some of the seating has been replaced by slightly worn chairs and couches you might find in a neighborhood bookstore.

The whole design vibe is “lovingly disheveled,” according to associate artistic director Meghan Winch. Books are stacked all over the theater space, many provided by one of the partnering bookstores, Inkwood Books.

The production of “Meet Murasaki Shikibu” is part of Tiny Dynamite’s A Play, A Pie, A Pint series in which the price of a ticket includes a beer and a slice of pizza. The books, however, are not for sale. After the production many will be donated to the Free Books Project in Camden, a literary charity supported by Inkwood Books.