I'm just back from a Bunraku, or a traditional puppet theater, performance in UC Berkeley. Promoter, Peter Grilli, mentioned in the pre-performance lecture that Bunraku started in 1650s as an art for the masses, as opposed to then pre-existing theater for highly educated, and turned into art for the elite now. The obvious extension is to imagine highly educated elitist otaku of 2350 who gather at select performances to watch a remake of Evangelion.

The performance itself was moving. Of course, typically for the Japanese, as Ana-sempai observed, the basic plot is that people fall in love and then they die (exactly like RahXephon and 08th MS Team). If the viewer is willing to play along, it is easy to abstract the puppeteers and get swept into the show, just like one abstracts plane space or a mobile suit.

Unfortunately, picture-taking was prohibited.