“Atsuko Okatsuka: The Intruder” premieres Saturday, Dec. 10, on HBO and HBO Max.
In her first HBO stand-up comedy special, comedian and actress Okatsuka brings her brand of ingenious, offbeat storytelling to the Elsewhere stage in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she dishes on the futile art of impressing teenagers, attending a “Magic Mike Live” show with her grandmother, and the alarming reactions that she and her husband had to the unwanted presence of an intruder.
“Atsuko Okatsuka: The Intruder” is written, performed, and executive produced by Okatsuka, directed by Tig Notaro, co-executive produced by Michelle Caputo, Shannon Hartman, Josh Lieberman, and Katie O’Brien.
In its review, Vulturesaid, “A fun, assured, well-crafted example of how to do an hour-long special on a major platform, Atsuko Okatsuka’s ‘The Intruder’ is a balance of introductory material for audiences who won’t already know her work and a few long-form, well-developed anecdotes that make this special distinctive for established fans.
“The joke from the special’s title is one of the latter, In it, Okatsuka uses a story about someone trying to break into her h ome as a way to pull together all kinds of material about herself, her family, and her comic sensibility. By using it as a framework for how she reacts to things, what her husband is like, where she lives, what she likes, and what she wants, the intruder story becomes a canny way to explore all of these facets of who Okatsuka is as a comedian.”
For more information on Okatsuka, visit: https://atsukocomedy.com/