Broadway: Samurai Saga

A culture transplant poses the same difficulty as a heart transplant. It is socially as well as biologically instinctive to reject what is alien. One slightly condescending form of acceptance is to treat what is foreign as exotic. Culturally speaking, this makes one man’s meat another man’s persimmon. In many ways, the Grand Kabuki is a Japanese persimmon on a U.S. theatergoer’s palate. It is a sweet, sumptuous and strange new taste sensation with which to start the Broadway season.

Dramatically, the Kabuki is most accessible to a Western audience when it mirrors human nature, and most baffling when it reflects the feudal social structure of 18th century Japan. In its painstakingly stylized way, the Grand Kabuki converts action and experience into a series of magnificent pictorial still lifes that remind one again and again of ukiyo-e, the “floating world” of Japanese prints. The paramount problem is tempo. Implacably loyal to its centuries-old tradition, the Kabuki imposes the pace of the palanquin on the age of the jet plane.

Master of Sign Language. The most renowned play associated with this theater company is Chushingura, an 18th century saga of honor and bloody revenge that is almost Sicilian in tone. In its entirety, the play runs to eleven acts and two days, but only the first four acts are being performed by the Grand Kabuki during its current U.S. tour. The story is transparently simple. Moronao, the governor of Kamakura, lusts after Lady Kaoyo, the wife of Hangan, one of Moronao’s deputies. She rebuffs him. Moronao is furious and showers abuse on the unsuspecting and inoffensive Hangan. Pushed beyond sense and patience, Hangan draws his sword and strikes at Moronao. But he is in the sacred precincts of the shogun’s palace, where even to draw a sword is a crime. The shogun orders Hangan to commit harakiri. He does so, but not before his chief retainer swears to avenge his cruel death. That is what the next seven acts are about, making Hamlet seem like a speed demon in the revenge department.

Every little gesture has meaning in Kabuki theater, and the twitch of an eyebrow can be as electric as a lightning bolt. One of the stars of the company, Baiko, is a master of this sign language, and he plays Hangan with expressively poignant force. With staggering ease, Baiko also dominates the second number on the program, Kagami-Jishi (The Mirror Lion Dance), in which he plays a shy flower-loving maiden who turns into the king of beasts. (All female roles are played by men in Kabuki theater.) The three-stringed twang of the samisen haunts the entire evening like a choral book of lamentations.

The Grand Kabuki illuminates the paradox in the Japanese character, an outward decorum of almost inhuman restraint masking an inner fury of almost demonic feelings. Out of this tension the Japanese fashioned the peculiar beauty of their drama, rather like the Greeks, whose tragedies distilled the moral of “nothing in excess” from a people capable of nothing but excess.