Rashomon (play)
Rashomon is the name of several different stage productions, all ultimately derived from works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Source material Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's two short stories "Rashomon" (1915), also known as "The Rashomon Gate", and "In a Grove" (1922), also known as "The Cedar Grove", were famously fused and adapted as the basis for Akira Kurosawa's 1950 award-winning film Rashomon, screenplay by Kurosawa and frequent collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto. In 1951 the film won an honorary International Academy Award, following the success of the film in winning a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in the same year. The Kurosawa and Hashimoto screenplay deviates from Akutagawa's original stories in a number of ways, most notably by allowing a note of hope to triumph over Akutagawa's dark pessimism. Neither Akutagawa's story nor any of the plays based on it share anything with the popular traditional Rashōmon (Noh play) (c.1420) about a man who climbs the rajōmon gate to see if a demon is on top of it. Stage versions Fay and Michael Kanin This 1959 Broadway adaptation by Fay and Michael Kanin ran for six months (January–June) at the Music Box Theatre, New York, starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, who married