Westerners seeing a Kabuki play for the
first time frequently call it “wonderful.” That’s perhaps
more appropriate than they imagine, for the world of Kabuki is a
world of wonder—a world of poetry, color, spectacle, grace,
energy, and artistry. It is, to be sure, a world more of dreams
than of reality, if by reality we mean everyday life. That
quotidian reality so cherished by Western theater has little place
in the Kabuki theater. The word kabuki,
for example, is made up of three Chinese characters: ka
= song; bu
= dance; ki
= skill or technique (sometimes rendered as “acting skill”).
The whole word, however, is derived from the verb ‘to tilt’ or
‘to lean to one side’ and means ‘something abnormal or
askew’ in the sense of deviating from the ordinary. Kabuki,
therefore, actually means ‘off-beat performance,’ something
deliberately outrageous.
Kabuki
actors have often admonished their fellows to imitate life. “A
Kabuki actor,” remarked Sakata Tojuro I (1646-1709), “should
singlemindedly try to copy real life in performing whatever role
he is cast in.” This wasn’t the reality of everyday life,
however, but the reality of imagination. In The
Actors’ Analects, a collection of
commentaries on Kabuki by 17th-century actors, Sugi Kuhe (dates
unknown, fl. 1670-80) says, “The realism of a play springs from
fiction . . . ,” and Yoshizawa Ayame I (1673-1729) advises, “It
is probably good, after all, to make a mixture of half realism and
half imagination.” The Kabuki world has its own “reality”
and like Alice passing through her looking glass, the Kabuki
audience passes into the Kabuki wonderland.
The
non-representational nature of Kabuki is unsurprising considering
its roots. There’s no room here for a detailed history of this
17th-century Japanese theater, but it should be noted that its
father was the older, highly stylized Noh drama, its mother
popular dance, and its sibling the Bunraku puppet theater. Given
this lineage, a nonrealistic performance style was only natural.
Nonetheless, within its strict techniques and traditions, Kabuki
seems to generate a good deal of emotion both in its actors and
its audience. At first glance, this might seem unlikely,
especially to a Western observer who understands neither the
language nor the traditions of Kabuki theater. On closer
examination, however, this seems not only less incongruous,
but downright inescapable.
How,
in fact, are Kabuki actors trained to express the feelings of
their roles? Are there means other than acting that are used in
Kabuki to express feelings?
Though
they are not impenetrable, the performance traditions of the
Kabuki stage aren’t loose or flimsy. The Kabuki actor has
learned his techniques from his predecessors by years of
observation and imitation. Each gesture, movement, pose, and
inflection has been carefully worked out and perfected over three
hundred years of use. These techniques, including movement and
vocal practices, costume, make-up, properties, music, sound
effects, stage assistants, and so on, are called kata;
they’re passed on from generation to generation, inherited along
with the names of the actors themselves within an acting family.
(I’ll address some of these non-acting kata
later.) A young Kabuki actor must be born or adopted into a
performing family to gain access to its kata,
and he learns them by rote from his father or other senior male
relative. The restrictive iemoto
system under which the Kabuki world operates dictates that the
head of the family, the iemoto,
determines who’ll be allowed into the family and what happens
within it. The training of Kabuki actors, all of whom are male, is
unlike Western training in many respects. Though some formal
classes have been instituted in recent years, the traditional
training system for Kabuki actors is by master and disciple. The
new system speeds the process up a little, but it’s still a
long, rigorous, and highly disciplined one. The Kabuki actor’s
theatrical education is based “upon exact and unquestioning
imitation,” not explanations of theories or principles. It
is largely unwritten, passed on in secrecy by word of mouth from
master to student.
The formal
training I’m referring to here is artistic or theatrical
training. Today, many Kabuki children attend regular schools for a
general education. Samuel Leiter, one of the most respected
Western scholars of Japanese theater, points out, “The number of
college-educated Kabuki actors is growing though there are those
who complain that the time spent in college is a waste for the
Kabuki actor who aspires to greatness.” Because of the
hereditary nature of the kata
and the privacy of the teaching, the actor-training process
remains largely secret and inaccessible to most outsiders. Very
little has been published regarding the specific training of
Kabuki actors within the family. Since the advent of the National
Theater’s training program, though, some description of the work
is available, and Kabuki actor Nakamura Matazo II (b. 1933), an
adoptee who’s devoted himself to demystifying the Kabuki world
by lecturing and teaching abroad and to foreigners in Japan, has
published Kabuki Backstage, Onstage:
An Actor’s Life which details
aspects of the life of a Kabuki actor off stage.
In
1969, the National Theater launched its Kabuki Actor Training
Center which trains young men (and, lately, some women, though
they won’t be members of the Kabuki troupes) who aren’t
members of any of the traditional families. The training center is
subsidized by the Japanese government and the program is free for
those accepted. The training, which lasts two years, includes
voice production and vocal expression, make-up, dance and
movement, singing, and music (particularly, playing the samisen),
but the kata
still remain private preserves of the families that own them. A
graduate who wishes to perform with the great Kabuki companies
must still become an apprentice (deshi)
to an actor in one of the families (though there are independent
and experimental companies, as well as filmmakers, who adapt
traditional Kabuki techniques for modern performances). Nakamura
Matazo, who (along with most other sources) puts the start of the
training center in 1970, has taught there and reports:
We
have found that the biggest problem is in placing the students
once the two-year training program is completed. In March 1972 our
first group of students demonstrated the skills that they had
learned in a graduation recital at the conclusion of two years of
hard work. But even though they had completed the program, they
were by no means ready to play starring roles on major kabuki
stages, and those of us responsible for the program had no idea
what to do with these young kabuki actors of the future.
In
the iemoto
system, training in classical dance, which begins almost as soon
as the little boy can walk, takes up most of his formal training.
This, as we’ll see, is an important factor in shaping the Kabuki
world. In addition to dancing, the Kabuki actor must be capable of
some very demanding physical performances, including animal roles,
such as tigers, rats, or parts of horses, and elaborate
somersaults and flips for battle scenes. Part of his training,
therefore, includes strenuous acrobatics and martial arts. Though
he will have a master for dance and acrobatics, his knowledge of
the theater and the family’s traditional roles and kata
will come from his father or adoptive father. His first lessons
come not from classes, but from watching his father and the other
senior actors in the company. Later, still at the very young age
of three or four, he’ll play small parts in actual performances,
often appearing with his father in early roles. In the 1985 U.S.
tour of the Grand Kabuki, there were several such
multi-generational performances. In The
Scarlet Princess of Edo
(Sakura-hime Azuma Bunsho),
Kataoka Takao (b. 1944) starred in a dual role while his teenaged
son Takataro (b. 1968) played a small part. In the dance-play The
Earth Spider (Tsuchigumo),
Onoe Shoroku II (1913-89) appeared with both his son, Tatsunosuke
(1946-87), and his then-ten-year-old grandson, Sakon (b. 1975).
(Kataoka Takao took the prestigious name of Nizaemon XV in 1998.
Onoe Tatsunosuke I died unexpectedly at 40 and was posthumously
elevated to his father’s name as Shoroku III in 2002. Onoe Sakon
II became Tatsunosuke II in 1991 and Shoroku IV in 2002. Kabuki
actors are traditionally called by their given names. In Japanese
tradition, the family name is given first, though many publishers
of European-language texts, and some Japanese born since World War
II, follow Western custom.)
As
the young actor watches and copies his elders, learning the kata
he hopes to be called upon to perform himself in later years, he’s
expected to act each new role exactly as he learned it. The roles
a master teaches his student are carefully chosen according to the
young actor’s physical and temperamental qualities. Though
younger actors are permitted to make minor variations if their
teachers feel there’s a physical or temperamental need, any
changes must be requested by the student and agreed to by the
teacher. As he rises from one level to the next, each step
granting him more interpretive freedom—within very narrow
limits—he’s constantly being tested and judged by his family,
the Kabuki community in general, and the audiences. Even after
long years of training, the process of study and discipline
doesn’t stop, and a Kabuki actor isn’t deemed to have reached
the level of mastery, if he ever does, until well into middle age.
With each step of the actor’s development, he faces the
knowledge that, although he has achieved one level of artistic
skill, he must still face another, higher level. Many actors, such
as Bando Tamasaburo V (b. 1950), the popular onnagata,
or female-role specialist, continue to study the techniques of
earlier actors whose physical appearance resembled their
own.
It’s interesting to note,
incidentally, that Tamasaburo, one of the best onnagata
actors of his day, is an adopted member of the Morita acting
family. At 60, he’s still performing as a young girl. The first
Kabuki onnagata
to appear in a western female role when he played Lady Macbeth in
1976, he remains extremely popular in Japan, appearing in films as
well as modern stage performances. Other onnagata
also continue to play girls and young women well into their 80’s:
Sakata Tojuro IV (b. 1931), a Living National Treasure and the
first since 1774 to hold that name, still convinces audiences he’s
a young girl on stage. Nakamura Utaemon VI (1917-2001), like
Tojuro a Living National Treasure, last performed one of his
signature roles in 1988 at the age of 71. In 1988, as Nakamura
Senjaku II, Tojuro toured western North America and Honolulu—where
I saw him—with the Grand Kabuki company. He appeared then as
Chubei, a wagoto
male principal, in A Messenger of
Love in Yamato (Koi
Bikyaku Yamato Orai) opposite his
own son, then Tomotaro (b. 1959), as Umegawa, a courtesan—a role
Senjaku II, his father, had played opposite Kanjaku IV, his
grandfather. (Tomotaro took the name Kanjaku V in 1995.)
The
Kabuki actor faces this never-ending process because he’s
entered onto the “way of art,” or geido,
which is the “known path to knowledge and the initiate is guided
in his steps along the path by a master already proficient in its
secrets.” Although this path includes specific kata,
the Kabuki actor “looks beyond them to a total approach to
kabuki acting.” The “way of art” and the total approach to
Kabuki are important in the examination of how this stylized
theater creates its emotional effect. We’ll see that the
effect itself is somewhat different than its counterpart in the
Western theater.
If Kabuki is
not concerned with factual truth but imaginative truth, it’s
because drama refines truth and an actor should be able to perform
so that the audience is impressed with the refined beauty (yugen)
of his performance. In Japanese esthetics, yugen
is the epitome of truth. Unlike the Western representational
theater, in which an actor must convince his audience that he is
someone he’s not, in Kabuki drama, because it has its roots in
dance, the actor needn’t do this. His audience easily accepts
him as an artist; they know they’re watching a play whose
performers are as much dancers as they are actors. The spectators
aren’t there to be fooled, or to be moved by a vision of daily
existence. They’re there to be moved “by images clearly
distinguished from reality by the precision of their design.”
Readily accepting, even demanding this, the Kabuki audience is
moved by the technical skill and virtuosity of the actor as he
executes kata
they have seen before, and which they know almost as well as the
actor does. (Even Westerners at a ballet don’t demand realism or
the realistic portrayal of emotions. Yet the Western audience,
just like the Japanese Kabuki audience, might weep or cheer, too,
if etiquette permitted it. They, too, may have been moved by the
grace of a Gelsey Kirkland pirouette, the power of a Mikhail
Baryshnikov leap, or the beauty of a grande promenade.)
This
isn’t to say that Kabuki actors don’t feel any of the emotions
of their characters. The strength and importance of the technique
notwithstanding, they do experience the feelings, too. Nakamura
Utaemon VI, one of the best onnagata
of the 20th century, explained, “My father, Utaemon V
[1865-1940], used to teach me and other apprentices to learn the
interiorization of characters before anything else. . . . What was
important was that [the actor] had the internal conception
correctly. The first thing is internal characterization. After it
comes the external.” Not all Kabuki stars agreed. Bando
Mitsugoro VIII (1906-75), an expert in aragoto
male roles and one of the founders of the National Theater
training program, insisted, “I don’t believe that an
interiorization is absolutely essential to kabuki
acting. The external is enough.” However, “If you are just
presenting a form—with no feeling, no heart—you are just a
doll,” said Onoe Baiko VII (1915-95), another famous onnagata
(and Living National Treasure). “There is no impact.” A
talented actor may learn the kata
perfectly, Baiko added, but unless he also has kimochi,
the feeling true to the character and the situation, he will give
empty performances. An example of how this comes out can be seen
in the following moment from a performance of Nakamura Kichiemon I
(1886-1954), admired for his line delivery, as Jirozaemon in
Kagotsurube Sato no Eizame
(The Courtesan
or The Bewitched Sword):
After
the scene of “the first encounter” is over, Jirozaemon, a
hick, a pock-marked merchant,
realizes that in all his life he has never seen such a wonderful
woman and, umbrella in hand, stands there, watching her walk away
on the hanamichi. His servant is behind him, but, he, his mouth
agape, keeps watching the end of the hanamichi, as if he’d been
robbed of his soul. His haori
coat [jacket worn over a kimono] starts sliding down, so his
servant calls out, “Master, sir.” Jirozaemon says, “Yado
e kaeruwaa.” As you know, the
complete line is, “Yado e kaeru
wa iya ni natta” (I no longer want
to go back to my inn). But saying, “Yado
e kaeruwaa,” he continues to watch
the end of the hanamichi, entranced. He’s holding an umbrella,
you see, and he will drop it, but he doesn’t do it for a long,
long time. The audience keeps watching. “Yado
e kaeruwaa” having been said, the
audience is waiting to see what comes next. Then the umbrella
drops with a thump. The wooden clappers give the first clap, then
comes “iya ni natta,”
the clappers continue, and the curtain falls.
This description, by
controversial Japanese novelist and poet Yukio Mishima (1925-70),
a devotee of Kabuki theater, is fraught with emotional content—at
least as Mishima responded to the performance. When they were
originally conceived, the kata
were methods devised by actors to convey emotions or other
meanings. Over the centuries they’ve become codified, and the
modern Kabuki actor learns them technically. (They may be compared
superficially to the stage gestures and expressions devised by
François Delsarte in the early 20th century.) For instance, a
female character might show grief by holding her hand in front of
her face to conceal her tears. Constant repetitions, however,
“lead the actor to an appreciation of the interior truth behind
his physical exertions in the role.” In fact, he learns the
original reason for the kata’s
creation. Though he comes to feel the emotions of the character
he’s playing, a Kabuki actor doesn’t ordinarily motivate his
actions the way a Western actor does. (Many contemporary Kabuki
actors study Stanislavsky and other Western acting theories, but
not so much for practical use as to be conversant with other
interpretations of their art.) In his preparation for his
entrance, for example, a Kabuki actor sits before a large mirror
in the small room at the end of the hanamichi
entrance ramp. He studies the external appearance of his character
so he can absorb its nature. His character isn’t based on
something internal but on the outer image.
Kata,
though they’re traditional techniques many of which have been
used for centuries, aren’t always as rigid as this may seem to
make them. There’s considerable variation in the performance
of kata,
though it may take a very experienced eye to notice. Specific kata
may be performed differently by different actors doing the same
role; even if the general shape of the kata,
say a mie,
is the same, it may be invested with different energy and
feeliings by different actors—thus communicating a different
psychological or emotional state. “If I can use a traditional
form [kata]
to portray an emotion, I do so,” explained Baiko. “If the
traditional form in a certain scene does not suit my style, I
think it over and proceed to perform as I see fit, even if it
means a change from the conventional manner.” Novelty for its
own sake, of course, isn’t a virtue in Japanese art, but
variation has its place.
Some
deviations in kata
are the result of several versions existing from the past. Earlier
Kabuki actors had far more freedom to create kata
to suit both their needs at the moment and their physical
strengths and limitations, and these kata
have each become part of the available tradition for today’s
performers. An actor may choose one of the variations at his
discretion, providing he has the artistic stature to do so.
Often, the difference may seem minuscule, but occasionally the
choices are quite dissimilar. In one common scene in many Kabuki
plays, for example, in which a character must inspect the head of
an executed child, the actor may use one of a number of distinct
kata.
He may lightly touch the sides of the box containing the head and
look into it, he may shade his eyes with his hands, or he may draw
his sword on another character and look into his face. The kata
themselves are traditionally executed, but the actor has a choice
of which one to use, and each will convey a different emotion for
the character.
Even the
traditional kata
of past generations can be altered. It’s not easy, and the
adjustments may be very subtle, but as an actor achieves higher
and higher levels of proficiency, he may personalize the kata
he’s inherited. He may, for instance, impatiently tap his hand
at a significant moment, or walk in one scene with is toes pointed
out instead of in. These refinements and interpretations may be
abandoned after one performance, or they may become part of the
tradition themselves. Actors change kata
for several reasons, not all of them aesthetic. The actor may want
to reinterpret a character or a scene, or he may wish to
accomodate some peculiar physical strength or weakness. An ancient
actor may, for instance, have changed a bit of business because he
grew fat or became injured and modern actors may still use the
“new” kata
even though they don’t have the same physical limitations.
Kataoka Gato V (b. 1935), a tachiyaku,
or actor specializing in male roles, plays the same characters his
father (Nizaemon XIII, 1903-94) and grandfather (Nizaemon XI,
1857-1934) played; in fact, he learned the kata
from them and then his father taught him the roles. But Nizaemon
XIII was slimmer than Gato and the son adjusted his performances
to accommodate his physicality, subduing his performances
somewhat, playing the parts less forcefully than his predecessor.
So far I’ve been discussing
kata
in general, and since the term covers every aspect of the Kabuki
performance, it’s necessary to look at it broadly first. There
are dozens of categories of kata,
many of them non-acting, and each category has myriad types and
each type may have several variations. There’s hardly room here
to discuss any of this in detail, so for our purposes I’ll
examine briefly, and superficially, a very few of the most
striking kata
an actor can use to demonstrate emotions and mood, as
differentiated from kata
that primarily convey plot, pure esthetics, or technical
adjustments.
The most unusual
device of a Kabuki performance, one that has no like in any other
theater form, is the mie.
A “frozen moment,” as Samuel Leiter calls it, a mie
is a dynamic pose held rigidly for a few minutes by one or more
actors; it’s created and selected by the actors as an effective
way to show the inner feelings of the character. It’s been
compared to a spotlight on a stage actor, a close-up in film, or
italics in print. It stops the action of the scene and
intensifies the emotions much the way the “significant moment”
of a television soap opera does—except with much more
panache. There are dozens of different mie,
all with different configurations and purposes. One of the most
powerful belongs to the Ichikawa family. This mie,
which includes a fierce, cross-eyed grimace called nirami,
is performed at the Kojo
or name-taking ceremony by the Ichikawa actor assuming the
title Danjuro. It was a highpoint of the 1985 Grand Kabuki tour
which included the Kojo
for Danjuro XII (b. 1946), holder of the most illustrious name in
all of Kabuki. This mie
is so powerful, Kabuki devotees consider it to have magical
powers, tremporarily driving illness, misfortune, and other evil
forces out of the theater.
Another
famous mie
occurs in A Messenger of Love in
Yamato, a popular wagoto
(“soft style") play of the Nakamura family. The hero,
Chubei, a poor, young courier, and his rival, Hachiemon, a wealthy
but boorish merchant, are both in love with Umegawa, a beautiful
courtesan. Each actor demonstrates his antagonism towards his
opponent by striking a mie,
held for two clacks from the tsuke
wood blocks, combining the effects of the visual image and the
sound to emphasize the heat of the moment.
Almost
as striking as the mie
is a certain kind of exit, usually executed on the hanamichi,
called a roppo.
Literally meaning “six directions,” the roppo
is a swaggering walk which may indicate arrogance, bravado, or
machismo. The best known of these exits is the tobi,
or “flying,” roppo.
The actor almost literally flies down the hanamichi
in great jumps, his arms and legs going in “six directions”
at once. It’s a spectacular sight, and greeted with much
delight by the audience.
Both
the nirami mie
and the roppo
are elements in aragoto
acting, one of the five general Kabuki acting styles. Invented in
Edo in the 17th century by Ichikawa Danjuro I (1660-1704), it’s
the grandest, most exaggerated style, projecting power and
masculine bravura of both villains and heroes. Aragoto’s
converse, showing tenderness or humor, is wagoto
acting, the special province of the Nakamura family of the
Kyoto-Osaka Kabuki center, invented by Sakata Tojuro I. Certain
plays and roles are written in these styles, so they’re not
really options an actor can choose; nonetheless, they’re
techniques that convey emotion and inner character. (The other
three acting styles are maruhon,
or “puppet style,” borrowed from Bunraku; shosagoto,
“dance style,” used in Noh-derived dance plays; and danmari,
“wordless,” a short pantomime suggesting nighttime action.
These styles have less to do with character and emotion than
spectacle and technical virtuosity.)
The
Kabuki script, which isn’t regarded with the same reverence as a
Western play text to start with, includes many points where actors
are expressly required to improvise. (James Brandon, a professor
of theater at the University of Hawaii at Manoa—I’ve taken two
classes from him myself—and one of our most respected experts on
Asian, especially Japanese, theater, has written a fairly
comprehensive essay on the various kinds of improvisations
specified in a Kabuki script: “Performance and Text in Kabuki”
in Japanese Theatre and the
International Stage.) These
prescribed breaks in the performance text, to use Richard
Schechner’s phrase, are intended to provide actors an
opportunity to “express his character’s feelings and
thoughts.” (I believe that what Yukio Mishima was describing
above were instances of Kichiemon’s using his freedom to
improvise to show how his character felt.) Of course, an actor’s
license “to fill the moment” are restricted according to the
actor’s artistic standing and the acquiescence of the leading
actor, who’s responsible for the overall shape of the
production. (Traditional Kabuki troupes don’t have directors in
the conventional Western sense, but the lead actor serves as
artistic director—much like the principal actor in 19th-century
Western troupes.)
Dance and
choreography are another skill the Kabuki actor must use to convey
emotion. Not only is Kabuki as a whole derived in part from dance
(bu,
the middle syllable, means dance, you’ll recall), but much of
the Kabuki repertoire are dance dramas (shosagoto)
and plays derived from Noh. As I mentioned, dance is a fundamental
part of the training for novice Kabuki actors because shosagoto
plays require them to portray their roles almost exclusively
through choreography. In Kasane
(Kesakake Matsu Narita no Riken),
for example, a two-hander in which a pair of onnagata
each play two roles, the characters express their passion and
confusion, ranging from lyrical elegance to savage ferocity, in
dance.
Along the same lines,
physical dexterity and agility are also tactics Kabuki actors can
use to convey emotion and psychological state. Along with dance,
Kabuki actors are trained extensively in acrobatics and martial
arts and tremendous strength and control is a necessity for Kabuki
acting. “An actor needs tremendous coordination of body,
suppleness, ability to adjust from one position to another, and he
must have perfect balance,” asserted Baiko. The greatest actors
can manipulate the smallest parts of their bodies and make the
smallest gestures and movements so that the subtlest changes carry
meaning because the norm on the Kabuki stage is stillness.
Nakamura Matagoro II (1914-2009), a renowned onnagata,
was known to be able to move his eyebrows alone, without moving
any other part of his face, even his eyelids. Matagoro was expert
at the technique of separation—moving one part of the body while
keeping the other parts immobile. Few other actors had his skill
in this area, but the principle holds: Kabuki actors use their
superb physical control to enhance the emotional aspects of their
performances.
Since Kabuki is
rhythmic both in its movement and its speech, there are
several identifiable vocal kata.
Most are written into the script, but, as with any kata,
there’s still room for variation by master actors. One in
particular is sawari,
analogous to our soliloquy but always spoken by a female
character. The name means “touch,” and it’s a device for
touching the chords of pathos in the audience as the heroine
expresses her sorrow. The onnagata
shares the dialogue with the chanter, who speaks while the actor
mimes the character’s deepest feelings. (Matagoro also had
extraordinary skill at manipulating his voice, using varied
pitches in his vocal delivery. This is clearly another technique
Kabuki actors, highly trained in singing—the first syllable, ka,
means “song”—as well as dance, can use to communicate
emotions.)
Although Kabuki is an
actor-centric theater, there are dozens of other elements
essential to the performance. These are also governed by kata,
many of which help convey emotion, mood, or atmosphere,
assisting the actor to develop the scene. Possibly the most
important, given the dance roots of Kabuki, is the
ubiquitous musical and rhythmic accompaniment. Music, which
establishes mood for every scene, is provided by an off-stage geza
ensemble. Though carefully matched to the content of the
scene, it’s not coordinated to the actor’s actions in the same
sense that Western background music is. Among the several sound
kata
are wooden clappers, known as tsuke,
which usually underscore the already spectacular effect of a mie
or augment the martial atmosphere of tachimawari
stage combat. The tsuke
clacks enhance the emotional content of the mie
by filling the sound space of the action. The kata
for the tsuke
and the other wooden clapper, the ki,
are pretty standard, but there are variations possible, and,
according to ki-
and tsuke-players
on tour with the Grand Kabuki in 1988, the actors can request
certain types of rhythms, thus selecting the emotional support the
beats give their scenes.
Costume
and make-up kata,
of course, help reveal character in some of the same ways they do
in the West. Since dress and appearance are codified, there’s
little leeway for variation, but one kind of make-up because of
its stylized design enhances the actor’s ability to express
emotion. As worn by the aragoto
actor, the kumadori
make-up is composed of bold lines that follow the musculature of
the face. Rather than hiding the expressions the actor uses like a
Noh mask or even other Kabuki make-up, kumadori
make-up allows “every facial gesture to be seen clearly in the
vast reaches of darkened theaters,” making the feelings evoked
by the actor’s grimaces and scowls all the more visible to the
audience.
There are many other
devices that can be used to affect emotional portrayal in Kabuki,
including the position on the stage or hanamichi;
stage effects manipulated by kurombo,
the black-clad stage assistants; narration by a reciter, an effect
borrowed from the puppet theater; and even special curtain kata
that reveal things about the characters and their feelings. The
list is endless, since, in the stylized performance of
Kabuki, the symbolic use of any device can transmit a meaning to
the knowledgeable audience. Furthermore, since the audience is
mostly there for the beauty and spectacle of the presentation,
it’s less the message than the medium that moves them. Kabuki
theater is meant to be an emotional experience for the audience,
not the intellectual or spiritual one that Noh provides. The very
nature of the performance, the characters, the dialogue, the kata,
the designs, costumes and make-up, and special effects all
evolved, and not by accident, to make the audience respond
emotionally and viscerally. It is, in the end, the complete
harmony of all the elements of the production, each making
its own contribution to the overall beauty, that results in the
special world of dreams that is Kabuki.
[The
art of Kabuki theater is complex and fascinating, especially to us
Westerners. I’ve discussed only a small aspect of the acting
techniques used to express and convey emotion (with a brief
mention of some non-acting practices), but there is a great deal
more to this performance form than I’ve hinted at here. Indeed,
many Western scholars and theater artists have devoted their lives
to studying and trying to understand this art. There are many
sources for a history of Kabuki, including the Internet. The
interested reader should also consider, among others, Chapter 20
of Yoshinobu Inoura and Toshio Kawatake’s
The Traditional Theater of Japan (New
York: Weatherhill, 1981). A more detailed analysis of the form is
provided in Studies in Kabuki by
James R. Brandon, William P. Malm, and Donald H. Shively
([Honolulu]: University Press of Hawaii, 1979).]
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07 September 2011
By Jon
Lackman
[A
little over a year ago, a friend sent me a column from Slate,
the on-line journal. At the time, the word Kabuki
was making the rounds in political punditry as a term meaning
‘affectation’ or ‘pretense’ and the columnist, Jon
Lackman, thought it was being overused by the chattering class.
(The word Kabuki,
though derived from three Chinese characters that mean song,
dance, and acting skill, as a whole means ‘something abnormal or
askew’ in the sense of deviating from the ordinary. Kabuki,
therefore, actually means ‘off-beat performance,’ something
deliberately outrageous.) I think my friend sent me the column in
part because I’d studied about Kabuki and liked it as a theater
form; I imagine he thought this particular article would amuse me.
He was right. I’ve been waiting for a suitable slot in the ROT
schedule so I can share it with the readers, and now that we’re
about to lurch into another presidential campaign season, I
suspect the word may have another burst of popularity among
political commentators. Lackman’s original column appeared on
Slate
in “The Good Word: Language and How We Use It,” a regular
column in the journal, on 14 April 2010
(http://www.slate.com/id/2250081/).]
Judging
from op-ed pages and talk radio, American pundits know a lot about
Kabuki, the 400-year-old Japanese stage tradition with the Lady
Gaga get-ups. Health care reform recently brought Kabuki to mind
for both Rush Limbaugh—"what you have here is 'Kabuki
theater' "—and New York Times
columnist Frank Rich: "[I]f I
were to place an incautious bet on which political event will
prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn't choose the
kabuki health care summit." For The
New Yorker's George Packer, all the
capital's a Far Eastern stage, and all its men and women merely
players. "I looked for answers outside the Kabuki theatre of
Washington personalities."
Pundits use Kabuki
as a synonym for "posturing." The New
Republic's Michael Crowley, for
example, has defined it as a "performance, in which nothing
substantive is done." But there's nothing "kabuki"
about the real Kabuki. Kabuki, I'll have you know, is one of
UNESCO's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of
Humanity! And it's nothing like politics. It does indeed use
stylized gestures, expressions, and intonations, but it's far from
empty and monotonous. As the scholar A.C. Scott has written, a
great Kabuki actor's performance will "contain an
individuality beneath the unchanging conventions, his symbolism
must be something more than imitative repetition." Unlike a
Dick Durbin stemwinder, the quintessential Kabuki moment (known as
a kata)
is colorful and ruthlessly concise, packing meaning into a single
gesture. It is synecdoche, synopsis, and metaphor rolled
together—as when, in one Kabuki play, a gardener expecting a
visit from the emperor cuts down all his chrysanthemums except
one, the perfect one. And in contrast with our own shortsighted
politics, Kabuki concerns not the present so much as a "dreamlike
time shrouded in mist but ever present in the subconscious,"
to quote critic Shuichi Kato.
Of
course, pundits don't care about the real thing. They use Kabuki
precisely because they and everyone else have only a hazy idea of
the word's true meaning, and they can use it purely on the level
of insinuation. They deploy Kabuki
because:
1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3)
It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible.Kabuki
succeeds chiefly because it makes your opponent sound silly and
un-American. And finally kabuki
works because:
5) It sounds Japanese.
Needless to
say, it sounds Japanese because it is
Japanese. Point is, the word can conjure certain stereotypes about
Japanese politics. As the scholar Gerald Curtis has noted, we have
"an image of Japanese politics in which bureaucrats dominate
. . . and policy making is little more than a process of
collusion." For Rush Limbaugh, what better image with which
to tar health care reform?
But how did Kabuki, one of
Japan's most revered arts, come to signify loathsome fakery?
Kabuki escaped derision only so long as no one had heard of it.
The Japanese initially considered it too difficult to export;
indeed, seeing a Kabuki play cold is like tuning into Lost
midseason. Consequently, the word didn't appear in print in
English until the late 19th-century, and then only rather
infrequently. That changed when, following World War II, Japan's
government tried to shed its image as a global marauder by touring
its best Kabuki troupes. As historian Barbara Thornbury has
written, "spectacular, larger-than-life kabuki was seen as
having the potential to reignite America's nearly hundred-year-old
romance with exotic Japan." This concept, alas, failed
miserably. Although America's urban theatergoers lauded Kabuki,
their good opinion did nothing to improve ties between the United
States and its one-time enemy. Indeed, relations worsened due to
drawn-out treaty negotiations. When American official James C.
Hagerty visited Tokyo in 1960, protesters surrounded his car,
broke its windows, and nearly flipped it.
According to my
research, it was in this hostile atmosphere that Kabuki acquired
its modern derogatory meaning. Writing in 1961 about a State
Department plan to revise its security measures, Los
Angeles Times writer Henry J.
Taylor declared, "[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as
undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President
unhitched the plan's kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing
kabuki." Six months later, Taylor struck again, "Agriculture
Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes'
political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and 'had
mentioned it informally to the president.' "
Writers
have enlivened their prose with Kabuki
ever since. Usage increases whenever Japan is in the news for
disingenuous behavior—as in the early 1990s, when it turned out
that Japan's go-go economy was an elaborate sham. It's been
cropping up most recently due to the Toyota recall, which has made
some Americans question the Japanese car company's commitment to
safety. "Toyoda Is Wary Star of Kabuki at Capitol,"
blared the Wall Street Journal.
The word is also on the ascendant whenever fakery seems
particularly rife in American politics. Kabuki
loves itself a Senate nomination hearing.
It may seem
P.C. or peevish to ask writers to resist kabuki.
(Is Kabuki
resistance itself Kabuki?) The request is impractical, I admit. If
a former theater critic such as Frank Rich can't be trusted to use
it properly, who can? This is one of those writerly words that is
helpfully absent from ordinary conversation, that says, "Stand
back, pundit here!" (Slate
writers, by the way, have also abused Kabuki—repeatedly!)
But how would you feel if your favorite art form, ballet or
truckers’ quilts, say, became another nation's derogatory
epithet? How many Americans today steer clear of actual Kabuki (it
is regularly performed here) because of the word's reputation? And
there's a final reason to ditch it: Posturing
is far too tepid an indictment of contemporary American politics.
I'd sooner opt for Grand-Guignol,
which Wikipedia aptly defines as "graphic, amoral horror
entertainment." It is seppuku time for Kabuki.
© 2011
The Slate Group, LLC
[Back in
November 2010, I published a column on Kabuki theater, “Kabuki:
A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” followed by the republication of an
old review I’d written on the performances in New York City of
the Grand Kabuki company in 1985 (1 and 6 November 2010 on ROT,
respectively). In the first article, I said of the theater form:
“Kabuki is a world of wonder—a world of poetry, color,
spectacle, grace, energy, and artistry.” That’s a far cry from
the implications about which Lackman is writing above. At the end
of my 1985 review, I asserted, “Singing, ballet, acting,
storytelling, music, poetry—even worship—are integral parts of
most Eastern performances. Kabuki is an example, as the current
tour of the Grand Kabuki demonstrates to incomparable pleasure.”
I think, like Lackman—who seems to know Kabuki himself—that
most Americans who toss around the word derisively have never
marveled at an actual Kabuki performance. I’ve been in and
around theater most of my life, perhaps as long as 55 years as
spectator, actor, director, teacher, and writer. I was on my
second grad school go-round when I first encountered Kabuki, so I
was no novice to theater—and I fell madly in love with the
performance form immediately. It is, in my opinion, one of the
most astonishing and remarkable forms of art—not just
performance—I have ever experienced. For those of us who know
the art, misusing its name as dismissively as do the pundits
Lackman deplores is more than unfortunate and misleading. It’s a
mark of ignorance.]
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21 November 2010
On Saturday evening, 13 November, my friend
Diana and I drove over to Brooklyn to see Ping Chong’s staging
of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of
Blood. This is the great
filmmaker’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth,
starring Toshiro Mifune in a masterful performance as Taketoki
Washizu, the ambitious samurai who is the Macbeth character in the
film as well as Chong’s stage adaptation. It’s been a long
time since I’ve seen the Kurosawa flick—college, I think—so
I don’t remember many of the details, except that it was black
and white and a driving, thrilling movie, a classic in its own
right, even without Shakespeare’s poetry. Chong’s version, of
course, is in English, but he doesn’t return to the
Shakespearean text.
Chong’s
stage version, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s
Howard Gilman Opera House over an hour and 40 minutes without
intermission, was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
and the cast is drawn from the resident Ashland troupe. (The play
ran at OSF’s Angus Bowmer Theatre from 21 July to 31 October
this year.) The cast is heterogeneous so, aside from the English
dialogue, Chong’s adaptation is already a step or two away from
Kurosawa’s vision. Furthermore, the stage obviously can’t
accommodate the sweep and visual force of Kurosawa’s film, which
was almost wordless.
Chong’s
Throne of Blood
is a curious, but fascinating, effort. First of all, it’s not
Shakespeare and it’s not Kurosawa; Chong, known for his
multi-media experimental and avant-garde performances for the past
30 years, isn’t up to that level of artistry in my opinion. The
only review I saw before Saturday was Charles Isherwood’s notice
in the Times
the day before, and he took Chong to task essentially for not
doing the movie or the Elizabethan original. But if you look at
Chong’s Throne of Blood
as an artwork on its own, rather than an attempt to capture the
essence of either of its predecessors, that doesn’t matter as
much (even though Isherwood’s right in the short run). My
companion was unimpressed (to put it mildly): “What do you get
out of it?” she asked, after I disagreed with her negative
response. A profound theatrical experience, it’s not. This isn’t
West Side Story
or My Fair Lady
set beside Romeo and Juliet
or Pygmalion.
It’s also not Terrence McNally and Kander and Ebb’s Kiss
of the Spider Woman compared to the
Hector Babenco film. What’s on show here are the staging
techniques and the visual effects Chong devises to accomplish what
Kurosawa did with his camera. And while even these aren’t fully
satisfying in their execution, there are some ideas it’s
intriguing to imagine in their ultimate perfection (as they
probably can only be achieved on the mind’s stage).
The
outlines of Shakespeare’s story are still here, as they were in
Kurosawa’s film, transposed from medieval Scotland to feudal
Japan. Chong, I think wisely, doesn’t revert to the playwright’s
words (except for a few allusions to phrases from several plays),
which would only make the play seem pretentious and more
derivative than it already is. The language of Chong’s version,
based on the subtitles from the film, is neither poetry nor
contemporary prose. What it resembles more than anything else is
the English translation of classical Japanese theater, principally
Kabuki. Since Chong draws considerably on Kabuki and Noh staging
traditions for his presentation, this seems appropriate to me,
rather than a draw-back. It comes off as being foreign—sort of
like a well-dubbed film—but neither lofty nor pretentious. It
also let me remember that I was watching a performance, not a
slice of reality or fictionalized history like, say, Lion
in Winter or Man
for All Seasons. Since there are
other elements in the production that are presentational, this
fits with the style I believe Chong is after.
Isherwood
seemed to complain about the film sequences Chong used (designed
by Maya Ciarrocchi) and the suggested scenery (by Christopher
Acebo) because the one suggests Kurosawa’s cinematography
without realizing its “mood and atmosphere,” and the other
doesn’t evoke the “sweep and intensity” of Kurosawa’s
outdoor imagery. Again, if you don’t insist on comparing this
play with the film, that becomes an academic point, I think, and
both work for what Chong is doing. The films, which are projected
in a strip above the set, are mostly segments of nature
scenery—trees in a forest, cherry blossoms, rain. These serve as
fragments of projected scenery, to set the image of the terrain
and the landscape the way fragmentary sets do for interiors on a
stage. Some of the projections are story-related, like the moving
of Spider Web Forest (the stand-in for Birnam Wood). One repeated
image is the abstract ink drawing, in a style reminiscent of
Japanese painting, of bare branches with two leaves that become a
pair of staring eyes in a suggested face at the end of the two
Forest Spirit scenes. The fact that the projections resemble film
means they unavoidably call cinema to mind, and Kurosawa’s
Throne of Blood
in particular, but I don’t believe that Chong means for this
technique to substitute for Kurosawa’s film work; Chong, after
all, is a multi-media artist in his own right. Aside from
directing, writing, and choreographing, Chong, whose parents were
performers in Chinese opera (a precursor of Kabuki), is also a
video installation artist. He got his start as a performer with
Meredith Monk, and has worked in such diverse fields as puppetry
and oral history.
As for the
stage sets, it’s incontrovertible that they can’t compete with
the outdoor vistas that made Kurosawa’s film so visually
powerful, but since this is a stage play and not a film, no
setting could, so why try to compete? The play is episodic, one of
its weaknesses, so there are a lot of scene changes. The set
fragments, which silently move in electronically on slides or drop
down from the flies, accomplish this with alacrity and elegance,
giving the impression of a place without depicting it literally.
While Kabuki plays use elaborate and often quite realistic sets
(Noh uses almost no scenery), this looks more like Japanese
interior design—simple, unobtrusive, spare.
The
acting, though, is what was interesting to me. Chong obviously
wants to incorporate the stylized performance of Noh and Kabuki in
his staging of Kurosawa’s semi-realistic screenplay (written by
the director with four collaborators). First of all, the whole
play is framed as a flashback, with a prologue and an epilogue (in
Japanese with English supertitles projected on a photograph of the
ruins of Spider Web Castle) that outline the backstory—and, in
Brechtian manner, remind us that this is an ancient tale, not a
contemporary one. This makes the play an enactment of the history
of the place, a very typical Noh structure. (In true Noh, the
narrator of the tale, who’s only a voice-over in Throne,
transforms into the spirit of the place, often a demon or the
ghost of someone connected to the story. This isn’t part of
either version of Throne of Blood.)
Then the music, composed by Todd Barton (who also did the sound
design, which includes such effects as the sounds of weather
conditions—very integral to Kurosawa’s film—nature, and
horses’ hoofbeats), is recognizably evocative of Kabuki and Noh
music (that is, for anyone who has a familiarity with those forms
of theater, of course). There are also koken,
the black-clad stage assistants of Kabuki and Noh theater, on
stage several times.
The Forest
Spirit, Throne’s
stand-in for the witch (there’s only one instead of three as in
Shakespeare), is a Noh demon, all in white with a very long, full
white wig. Sitting on a small platform, the spirit turns the wheel
of a loom, weaving . . . . what? A spider web? He’s in Spider
Web Forest—and a familiar character in Noh and Noh-derived
Kabuki is the Demon Spider (who looks a lot like this Forest
Spirit). Is this spirit out to ensnare Washizu in his magical web
of enticing prophesies? As portrayed by Cristofer Jean, he speaks
in a rasping, unreal, stylized (and electronically manipulated)
voice that is an approximation of the slow, rhythmic delivery of
many Noh characters.
Lady Asaji
(the Lady Macbeth character), the most Noh-infused role in the
film, wears pasty makeup with stylized facial features so that her
face resembles a living Noh mask. The actress (Ako, who is from
Japan originally and performed there with an all-female troupe,
the Takarazuka Theatre) moves with the deliberate gait of a Noh
actor. These and other aspects of the performance demonstrate that
Chong wants to evoke traditional Japanese theater in his staging.
This is where his experiment fails for me.
Chong
can’t improve on Shakespeare and he can’t duplicate Kurosawa’s
masterpiece, so what would have worked for me was to see the
script interpreted in a hybrid of Western and Japanese staging
styles. As I said, I think that’s what Chong is attempting, but
while he can get the production artists—the designers and
technicians—to approximate Japanese staging techniques, he can’t
make Western actors do after a few weeks of rehearsals what
Japanese actors do. So, though I can see what Chong probably wants
on stage (because, as some of you know, I’ve studied Asian
theater, especially Kabuki, for some time), I can also tell that
the performers don’t execute it precisely. It’s the
difference, I’d say, between learning a language from childhood,
with years of study and living among native speakers, and learning
some speeches phonetically after a few months of practice and
coaching. (Ako, who trained in Kabuki dance, lent her knowledge
and expertise in Japanese traditional performance to the task of
training the company, along with a movement coach.) I’ll give
you one example. There’s limited action in the play; many scenes
involve groups of characters sitting, as in the great councils the
emperor holds several times. In a Kabuki play, when an actor isn’t
the focus of attention on the stage, he’s absolutely still.
Having struck the pose he’ll hold during that scene, often
kneeling and sitting on his heels, he doesn’t move a muscle
until he has lines or business. (This is a very important element
of Kabuki performance, and total stillness is a skill all novice
Kabuki actors must learn very early.) This stillness makes the
slightest movement momentously dramatic and theatrical; but it
also makes the merest twitch from an actor not in focus
destructively distracting. In Throne,
the actors come on stage for those councils, say, and take their
positions in semi-darkness, and we can see them strike their
poses, usually a wide-legged seated stance, because they do it
with a sharp, deliberate movement, all executed at the same
instant. But Western actor aren’t expected to be totally still
under just about any ordinary stage circumstances—and no actor
who’s not been trained in this technique can manage it. So while
they’re sitting without moving about or turning their heads,
they aren’t really still. What I believe is supposed to be a
Kabuki moment just isn’t, which mars what I think Chong is
aiming for theatrically.
Stillness
is only the most salient of this kind of problem, the easiest to
spot and to describe. There are similar issues with walking—both
Noh and Kabuki have very distinctive walking styles and it looked
like the cast was trying to approximate them here—and the
choreographed fight sequences, which seem to be modeled on Kabuki
tachimawari
battle techniques. Only Ako, trained and experienced in this
performance style, executes it well—and her presence on stage
makes the slips and lapses of the Western actors that much more
obvious. (In my studies of Asian theater, one of my teachers has
been James Brandon of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His
department there has a program of presenting Asian theater forms
in English with American actors, and I’ve seen taped
performances of Kabuki in English. Those actors, who are coached
by professionals from the theater they’re emulating, have
similar problems because the discipline is different.)
I
think I’ve made this all sound much more disastrous than it was.
I said that in my mind, I could see the perfect version of what I
believe Chong wants, but for an ordinary Western viewer, I suspect
none of that is noticeable. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive, or at
least hypercritical. Without the execution of the Japanese
traditional techniques in Throne,
however, we do come back to Diana’s question: “What do you get
out of it?” For whatever reason, the Japanese seem taken with
Macbeth:
aside from Kurosawa’s 1957 treatment, popular Kabuki actor
Tamasaburo Bando V became the first onnagata
(specialist in female roles in the all-male Kabuki theater) to
portray a Western female character when he played Lady Macbeth at
Tokyo’s Nissei Theatre in 1976; in the ‘70s and ’80s,
director Shozo Sato created a Kabuki
Macbeth (and a Kabuki
Lady Macbeth); in 1986, New York’s
Pan Asian Rep staged Shogun Macbeth;
and in 1990, BAM imported the image-dominated, experimental
Macbeth
by Yukio Ninagawa. The various staging styles aside, what these
adaptations all show is the universality of Shakespeare’s play
about ambition and treachery, which I believe was Kurosawa’s
motivation to make Throne of Blood
53 years ago. (Kurosawa’s been said to have been responding to
World War II, which ended just a dozen years before he made the
film. Chong has said that he sees the world today as very
similarly self-destructive.) But having already demonstrated that
(assuming, of course, that the very longevity of Shakespeare’s
tragedy hadn’t already made that clear), why translate to the
stage what Kurosawa already showed on film? Well, besides making
the screenplay accessible in a different medium (not to say, a
different language), I contend that it’s the staging style, the
theatricality Chong envisioned, that prompts yet another go at the
Scottish play à la japonaise.
(At the risk of making an unnecessary, and perhaps irrelevant,
joke, it begins to sound as if we’re encroaching on the
territory of that silly series of ads for Starburst candy where a
character calls his son a “contradiction” because he’s
“Scotch-Korean.”) If that vision is badly executed, the
experiment fails, I’d say. The idea’s not uninteresting,
theatrically speaking, but without a much longer training time,
and maybe some resident Kabuki or Noh actors in the company, I
don’t think it’s viable. Still, the attempt was
interesting—even a failed experiment can be worthwhile—and I
don’t join my friend Diana in saying it was a painful
experience. (I should probably equivocate some here: without my
admittedly somewhat rare perspective, other spectators might find
far less of interest in the production.)
One
thing about which Isherwood was correct is that “most of the
actors make little impression.” Except for Ako, as he noted, no
one stands out. (Cristofer Jean gets spotlighted as the Forest
Spirit, but that’s the role, not so much the performance, that’s
prominent. Jean does a fine job of it, however.) Kevin Kenerly as
Washizu, much like the other soldiers, has little to do but
bluster and strut, He has a couple of choreographed fights with
the samurai sword, and he’s convincing enough given the caveat
I’ve already issued about the tachimawari,
but it even took me a few scenes to be sure which actor was
Kenerly as Washizu and which was Danforth Comins as Yoshiako Miki
(Banquo) because there’s so little to distinguish one character
from another aside from the costumes. (The costumes, which
approximate 17th-century Japanese armor and other dress, are
beautifully designed by Stefani Mar. They’re modeled more from
museum exhibits, I’d say, than from Kabuki or Noh costumes, but
they have an air of authenticity. I must add that the battle
helmets are wonderfully exotic, with horns, wings, and crescents
looming atop the actors’ heads.) Eventually, the plot made the
distinction for me, but there’s nothing in the staging that
might have approximated, say, a bombastic aragoto
(“rough style”) performance from Washizu, as I might have
expected in a Kabuki rendition. In fact, in several scenes of
great tension with Lady Asaji, while she’s kneeling in
stillness, a figure all in white (including her face makeup)
except for the blood-red splotches on her kimono, Washizu paces
all around her in what looked to me like aimless agitation. That
weakens the character (in Kabuki terms, it almost makes him a
wagoto,
or “soft style,” character), which may align with
psychologically realistic Western behavior, but in a traditional
Japanese performance, it makes him less than the ruthless
protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy as reflected in a Kabuki
mirror. Washizu’s fall is more anticlimactic here than tragic. I
can’t entirely blame Kenerly for this; it looked like a
directorial choice, not an actor’s; but if Chong had been true
to the Kabuki or Noh style in such moments, Washizu would have
stood stock still, looking like a giant in an oversized costume,
or stridden across the stage in slow, heavy steps.
If
Chong doesn’t entirely succeed in translating Kurosawa’s film
masterpiece to the stage, he has done some intriguing work in the
attempt. Isherwood called the effort “an ill-conceived
theatrical enterprise,” and Diana agreed with that. The
Backstage
reviewer, however, asserted that the production “succeeds and
then some” in its ambitious aims. I don’t agree with either
estimation, but I ended feeling it was a worthwhile theater
experience—although I may have had an inside track.
[For
some explanation of the Kabuki terms and techniques I mentioned in
this report, see my recent article, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of
Dreams” (1 November).]
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05 December 2009
Some time back I was doing some reading to
catch up with the latest developments in theater tech and staging
concepts. This included some experiments in the employment of
computers in performance in ways that went beyond lighting control
and scenery shifting. A long time ago I had read an article in
Time
that reported on a new computer program, developed at MIT, that
let playwrights test scenes on screen without hiring actors and a
stage. Actors, directors, and designers were aghast, as you might
imagine, considering this now-primitive computer theater the nose
of a very scary camel inside the tent. If playwrights learned they
didn’t need actors, directors, and designers to see their work
come alive, what might ensue? We could all be out of business
permanently.
Well, that hasn’t
come to pass yet, and it’s been over 20 years since that report
appeared. Film has been invaded by computer technology, especially
in the action-adventure genre, and computers have become standard
equipment in theaters for scenic and lighting control (which might
exercise IATSE), but the only area of performance in which
computers have become an issue of contention is music--the
substitution of computer-generated music for real instruments
played by live musicians. (This is a real issue for AFM members
and has been the focus of much action by that union.) But
computer-generated acting does exist, still mostly at an
experimental level, though it has been used on stage a little
already. It’s coming, that’s for sure, unless some other, more
applicable technology arrives first.
Now,
I’ll confess that I like technology in theater. I don’t mean
that I reject theater-unplugged, as it were; but I can be bowled
over by the clever (and theatrical) use of tech in a performance
when it enhances the live elements of theater. I was amused when
Harry Guardino did scenes with a projected cartoon in Woman
of the Year in 1981. When Emily
Mann used closed-circuit TV on stage in her Broadway production of
Execution of Justice
in 1986, I thought it was neat. I was delighted with Penny
Arcade’s use of live video in Invitation
to the Beginning of the End of the World (Invitation to the
Beginning of the End of My Career)
in 1990. I don’t reject theater tech out of hand, though there
are many who disparage the use of anything beyond a Fresnel and a
Leko on stage. What I don’t appreciate is using tech to emulate
movies as if the goal of theater were to become a live-action
video game.
While I was revising
an old essay on documentary drama (another version of which
appears on ROT
as “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October), I
began to consider the use of computer-generated imagery on stage
as a real, if somewhat gimmicky, application. Computer controls
long ago changed the way lights, sound, and sets are designed and
run in the theater. As of now, however, computer theater’s a
speculation, but if we expand the idea into some of the emerging
technology that is already in experimentation for live theater, we
get intriguing potential developments: satellite broadcasting
(that is, from remote locations), CGI and holography, virtual
reality, computer sensors and motion capture, bluescreen
technology, Internet productions (live performances transmitted
via the Internet). There are certainly other computer applications
that are not yet part of the public awareness, still in
experimental stages in laboratories, which would expand this short
list, but some of this computer technology is already in use in
performance. Experimental theater artist George Coates has been
using CGI and other computer (and proto-computer) techniques in
his work for three decades and universities (where the technology
exists for now) have been testing various applications of
computers on stage beyond controlling the lights and the set
changes.
The name for this
hybrid theater hasn’t been settled on yet, either in the lit or
in common parlance. “Virtual reality (or VR) theater,” “cyber
theater,” and “computer theater” have their advocates, but
all have other meanings that create ambiguities. Other terms
exist, too, but most have broader or more limited applications
than the computer-assisted theater to which I’m referring. The
leading contender right now seems to be “digital theater”--the
one I’m going with for now--though that, too, has alternative
meanings referring to other applications. (Among these are the
recently-launched program in London of broadcasting live theater
performances to screens at remote theaters, including in North
America and other continents; the Internet transmission of
performances staged in a studio or another location and viewed on
home computers; and a method, developed by the Digital Theater
System, Inc., for recording surround sound for films and video.)
The two most significant criteria for the kind of digital theater
I mean is that it must focus on live actors in a performance space
with living spectators present for the performance. (For the
performance to be theater, as distinguished from, say,
dance--which has already been experimenting with computer-assisted
performances more than theater--a certain reliance on text or
narrative must be evident. But my emphasis here is on the computer
aspects of the performance, so a dance or performance art
presentation would serve just as well for my purposes.) Whether
the cyber element is a digitized actor or virtual scenery is
irrelevant to my point--except that it would have to be
substantial to make the production rise to the level of digital
theater, something more than a computer-generated special effect.
(Though a few years old already, the best article on this subject,
with several examples of the kind of technology to which I’m
referring, is “Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre,”
Theatre Topics
11.2 [September 2001]: 107-30, by David Z. Saltz, who is director
of the University of Georgia’s Interactive Performance
Laboratory.)
There’s a history,
short of course, for digital theater. The pre-history picks up
with the George Coates Performance Works, founded in San Francisco
in 1977. He started with electronic sound systems that manipulated
music in live performances the way a recording studio does on
tape; as electronic and digital technology advanced, so did his
theatrical experimentation. (Going back further into pre-history,
we encounter the works of other avant-gardists in the 1910s, ‘20s,
and ‘30s who used the technology of their eras in experimental
ways--film, projections, amplification, and so on.) Moving into
the 1980s, we begin to see the true early stages of digital
theater as computers became small enough to bring into the theater
and studio and powerful enough to do more and more complex tasks
in creating works of art. Music and visual art were the first
forms to capitalize on the new machines that were being invented
for communications, recording, and writing or drafting. Artists
merely turned the quotidian devices from office and school work to
art. By the ‘90s, the Internet and other advancements in the
cyber world had become part of everyday life and artists spread
out into the potentialities the new tech offered. Film and
eventually TV capitalized on the new possibilities almost
immediately; it was a natural fit: electronic devices for the
electronic media. Dance took advantage of the new tools next. As
the technology became cheaper, simpler, and more powerful and
flexible, artists found more and more ways to use it in their
work, and digital theater was born. In 2002, for instance, Kabuki
director Koji Orita used a computer-projected image animated in
real time by an actor in an off-stage room to portray a mythical
creature on stage opposite a live actor. Digital theater’s still
in the early experimental stages now, but just as sure as the Lord
made little green apples (as Harold Hill put it), it’ll be on
our stages soon enough.
For good
or bad, computers will become an element of the theater world.
Along with the work of Roy Ascot, GCPW, and the Gertrude Stein
Repertory Theatre, some universities, especially MIT, the
Interactive Performance Laboratory at the University of Georgia,
and the Virtual Reality Theatre Lab (now the Institute for the
Exploration in Virtual Realities) at the University of Kansas,
have worked with computer-generated imagery in live performances.
Computer sensors and motion captors allow actors to interact with
sets, props, lights, sound, and CGI’s. The Internet and
satellite transmission allow actors distant from one another--even
as far away as different continents--to act together in the same
play at the same time as live actors appear with projected images
of a distant actor. Plays produced on the World Wide Web using
webcams already represent a kind of guerrilla theater where actors
perform in public spaces as spectators, warned to tune in to a
certain website, watch on computer screens at remote locations.
(While this may be a form of digital theater by a looser
definition, the lack of a co-present audience at these productions
puts them outside the type of theater I’m considering. The
technology, however, can be adapted for use with live, co-present
spectators.)
A few years ago, I
was at the Shaw Festival in Ontario and one of the plays that
season was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s Invisible
Man. As I was watching the show, it
occurred to me that this would have been a great play on which to
experiment with computer-projected images. Since the title
character was invisible for so much of the play, his stage
"appearances" consisted mostly of standing off stage
somewhere, delivering lines over a mic while the rest of the cast
and the stage techies accomplished all the physical stuff. Like
the mythological character in Koji Orita’s Kabuki production, a
gauzy version of the character might appear in projection on the
set as the actor “performs” off stage in real time.
Emily
Mann’s Execution of Justice
had live closed-circuit video on stage, but it was either
prerecorded film--from The Life and
Times of Harvey Milk or news
coverage of the murders--or transmissions of images from the stage
as if they were on-location TV broadcasts. But Mann did do some of
this while characters were still coming on stage from the
wings--as if the TV cameras were following newsmakers--and the
audience saw the screen images before the live actors were
visible. That's a rudimentary precursor of what I'm imagining.
With the Internet and satellite transmission, the images can be
created live from a continent away; and with holography, they can
be projected not onto a screen, but onto the stage.
Just
as film actors (and TV weathercasters) now perform before
computer-generated bluescreen images that to the spectators look
as real as if the performers were filmed on location, I can
imagine actors in the theater working against projections or even
holograms from a real location historically associated with the
events of the play, what might be called virtual scenery. We may
perhaps see King Lear ranting before the actual Stonehenge or
Hamlet live on the ramparts of the real Elsinore castle in
Denmark.
Singer Natalie Cole
famously performed a 1991 duet with the video image of her dead
father, Nat King Cole, but we might soon see live on-stage actors
interacting with computer-generated images of long-dead historical
figures--a kind of live-action Zelig.
In Woman
of the Year, Harry Guardino acted
with that animated drawing--but that was a fake, of course: the
projection wasn't really reacting to Guardino. In a revival,
however, the actor might actually interact with a projected
cartoon animated in real time by an actor off stage.
In
And Then They Came for Me
(1996), audiences not only heard the recorded voices of survivors
of the Anne Frank hideout, they saw these people on video tape
projected onto the stage in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the
future, actors would be able to appear on stage with actual
participants live from the site of the events depicted in the
play. Think of a three-dimensional video conference (or a Star
Trek holodeck). A live actor in the
theater could act with another live actor miles away, but in real
time.
A further step along this
continuum might be to put a live actor on stage with real events
that are happening at that moment somewhere else in the world. In
my original documentary theater essay, I suggested that the
epitome of the genre would be what I dubbed drame-vérité--from
cinéma-vérité,
filmed actualities--a form of reality on stage. I said it couldn't
be accomplished--and given the technology of the early '80s, it
couldn't. But the march of technology has made that possibility
more likely and not unforeseeable at all. I'm not sure, but I
think all the technology necessary is available, though it's very
expensive, obviously, and not entirely reliable at this stage of
development. But we know that that situation doesn't last very
long.
Theater may or may not be
deliberately emulating movies, but I project, based on these
technological "advancements" that sooner or later,
movies and plays will be one and the same thing: you'll go to a
theater for a "live" event that's really holograms and
computer-generated images, whether it's Hamlet and Horatio, Luke
Skywalker and Han Solo, or Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. It'll
be a theatrical version of virtual reality. (Shortly after that,
they'll hook you up to electrodes and project the performance
right into your mind--a combination of play, movie, and dream.)
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06 November 2010
[Twenty-five years ago, the Grand Kabuki
of Japan launched a tour of the United States, which also included
stops in Washington and Los Angeles, with performances at the
Metropolitan Opera House, 8-20 July 1985. The company included two
Living National Treasures: Onoe Shoroku II, a principal actor and
the Grand Kabuki’s artistic director, and musician Kiyomoto
Shizutayu (1898-1999). The performances were divided into two
nights and I went to both evenings as a reviewer for Stages,
a New York theater monthly. As a companion article to “Kabuki: A
Trip to a Land of Dreams,” ROT,
1 November, I’m publishing here my original review (which was
longer than the version that appeared in the September 1985 issue
of Stages).]
During
the Kojo,
or “name-taking” ceremony, for Danjuro XII, one of the
participants admonishes the audience, “You call us ‘Kabuki
dancers’; we are Kabuki actors.”
Make no mistake: they are. And Kabuki is an actors’
theatre, music and effects notwithstanding. The latest visit by
Japan’s Grand Kabuki leaves no doubt of this.
In
two programs combining selections from the Tokyo-based company’s
varied repertoire, and, for the first time outside Japan, the
celebration of a great actor’s rise to a new name, the troupe
demonstrates not only the actors’ virtuosity, but also their
primacy in the world of Kabuki.
Note,
for instance, that the program lists no credit for director,
lighting, sets, or costumes. These, of course, are traditional for
each play, so there are few changes from production to production.
But someone must be responsible for attending to the faithful
execution of the traditions. Doubtless, someone is; but he is
anonymous. Not so the actors. Every member of the company is
listed by name in the front of the program, no matter how small
his role.
Consider, also, who was
chosen to make the current tour. Onoe Shoroku II is a Living
National Treasure; Bando Tamasaburo V and Kataoka Takao are the
most popular young actors in Kabuki and Danjuro is the most
honored actor of the year, akin to having been awarded the
best-acting Oscar, Emmy, and Tony, and being knighted all in the
same season. This is not only an acting company, but a star
company. [Shoroku died in 1989 at 76; Takao became Nizaemon XV in
1998.]
The current center of
attention is Ichikawa Danjuro XII. Having been elevated to his
family’s most illustrious name, vacant since his father’s
death in 1962, Danjuro has been celebrated in a daily Kojo
since April. Undoubtedly an actor’s ceremony, the Kojo
has but one purpose: to spotlight the honored performer while his
colleagues praise and congratulate him. The culmination of the
ceremony is Danjuro’s demonstration of a fierce mie,
a glaring pose, that is an exclusive specialty of Danjuros. The
fact that this ceremony has never before been performed outside
Japan further emphasizes the specialness of the actor in this
tour.
Because of Danjuro’s
special status, the Grand Kabuki is devoting its season to
traditional plays of Danjuro actors. Scores of leading actors
appear in plays mounted in his honor, such as the heroic comedy
Shibaraku,
which was first presented by Danjuro I in 1697. It is a prime
example of aragoto,
or “rough style,” acting—the province of the Ichikawa
family, invented by Danjuro I.
The
play tells of an evil courtier, Takehira (Shoroku), who usurped
the prime ministership by disgracing his rival. As Takehira is
about to have his rival’s sons beheaded, the fierce Kagemasa
shouts from offstage, “Shibaraku!” which literally means ”Wait
a moment!” Kagemasa (Danjuro) lumbers into view on the
hanamichi,
the runway through the auditorium, still shouting “Shibaraku!”
terrifying Takehira and his warriors. Indeed, he is a terrifying
sight: immensely tall, dressed in an oversized costume,
brandishing a six-foot sword, and wearing bold, red-and-black
(kumadori)
make-up that signifies his ferocity and rage.
After
a speech praising his and other company members’ past
performances, Kagemasa takes on all comers, including a dozen of
Takehira’s soldiers whom he beheads with one swing of his giant
sword. All this is performed with the bombast and bravura that is
the essence of aragoto
acting.
Showcasing another actor,
and another acting style, Kasane
is a two-character shosagoto
play, or dance piece, starring the Kabuki “matinee idols”
Bando Tamasaburo V and Kataoka Takao. Kasane, a beautiful court
lady, is played by Tamasaburo, an onnagata,
or specialist in female roles in the all-male Kabuki. One of the
most popular actors on the Kabuki stage, he has a following to
make a Western rock star jealous.
In
a lyrical pas-de-deux, Tamasaburo and Takao dance the story of the
love of Kasane and the dashing Yoemon, a disgraced samurai. Years
ago, Yoemon had an affair with Kasane’s mother and killed her
father. Now Kasane becomes possessed by her father’s spirit,
which disfigures her face with a hideous scar. As Tamasaburo
changes from lovely, gentle Kasane into a fierce, vengeful demon,
it is hard to remember that both are played by a man. Yoemon kills
Kasane and tries to flee, but cannot escape her spirit’s grasp.
The choreographed struggles between Tamasaburo and Takao make
clear why they are such popular stagemates.
Sakura-hime
Azuma Bunsho (The Scarlet Princess
of Edo) provides another opportunity to see Tamasaburo and Takao
together, this time in dual roles. (In its complete version, which
is no longer performed, Sakura-hime
is an all-day Kabuki play. We saw the Prologue, two scenes of Act
I, and Act V of the six-act melodrama which has been described as
“The Duchess of Malfi
as rewritten by Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams.”) In
this nineteenth-century play, Tamasaburo appears first as a young
acolyte, one of his rare male roles, then as beautiful Princess
Sakura, who sinks from an exalted position to degradation as a
prostitute. Takao, in a series of quick changes, plays both the
priest Seigen, who loves the acolyte and then struggles to save
the princess’s soul, and the murderous thief Gonsuke, who
seduces her and to whom she is drawn.
The
play is powerful and action-packed, covering everything from love
and mystery, through rape, murder, and suicide, to satire and high
comedy. The Prologue is the most visually striking scene of the
tour. In a beautifully lighted, fantastically atmospheric set
resembling a Japanese painted woodblock, Seigen and the boy climb
a cliff overlooking the sea. Planning a double suicide, the boy
jumps—but Seigen is unable to follow. An eerie blue-green
flame—the boy’s spirit—rises from the sea and hovers over
the weeping Seigen. It is, however, the combination of Tamasaburo
and Takao, and their double impersonations, that is the
attraction. The princess’s fall from grace is heart-wrenchingly
believable, and Takao’s instantaneous shifts from haunted Seigen
to villainous Gonsuke are absolute marvels.
The
other two plays, drawn from the Noh repertoire, both require
virtuosic acting. Another shosagoto,
Tsuchigumo
(The Earth Spider), adapted from a Noh classic, stars Shoroku as
both an evil magician and a goblin spider. The play is about a
young nobleman (Onoe Tatsunosuke, Shoroku’s son) overcome by a
strange sickness while under the malevolent magician’s power.
Attempting to escape in the guise of a great spider by ensnaring
his would-be captors in his web, Shoroku shoots streamers of white
ribbon from his fingertips as if he were, indeed, magical.
[Tatsunosuke died suddenly at 40 in 1987 and was posthumously
elevated to his father’s name as Shoroku III in 2002.]
The
spider is pursued to his lair, where a superbly choreographed
battle is danced, pitting the enchanted webs of Shoroku against
the sword of Danjuro, as the nobleman’s loyal retainer.
Throughout the battle, several koken,
ubiquitous but “invisible” stage assistants, run about
raveling up discarded webs with quick twirls of their hands, like
human forks twirling spaghetti.
In
Tachi Nusu-Bito
(The Sword Thief), the Kabuki version of a Noh Kyogen, or comic
interlude, a sly thief (Tatsunosuke) steals a drunken country
samurai’s sword. When he is caught, the thief tries to convince
the magistrate that the sword is his by mimicking everything the
samurai says and does. It is a complex and hilarious mirror
exercise, performed in stylized high comedy and dance requiring
extraordinary comic timing.
Kabuki
is unquestionably an actors’ theater and Kabuki performers are
unquestionably actors; they just happen to be actors who sing and
dance as well. It is a nearly impossible to separate the
performing arts into categories in Asia the way we do in the West.
Singing, ballet, acting, storytelling, music, poetry—even
worship—are integral parts of most Eastern performances. Kabuki
is an example, as the current tour of the Grand Kabuki
demonstrates to incomparable pleasure.
[At
the time I reviewed these performance, I had studied Asian theater
some and had become especially taken with Kabuki. Three years
after this tour, The Grand Kabuki visited western North America
and made a special stop in Honolulu where it was in residence at
the University of Hawaii-Manoa for three weeks. The university
offered a course in conjunction with the stay that included
backstage access and lectures and demonstrations by the master
artists of costume, make-up, music, and acting. I attended the
course but unhappily, I never documented the experience in
writing. This review, too short by half to provide an inkling of
the truly magnificent event it was, is the only record I have of
the extraordinary performance form that Kabuki is.]
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26 August 2012
YIDDISH
THEATER
[In Part 2 of “National Yiddish
Theatre – Folksbiene,” I pick up with the development of
Yiddish drama and theater, first in Eastern Europe, then in New
York City. In the final section, I’ll trace the history and, so
far as we can predict, the future of the last producing Yiddish
theater troupe in New York, the Folksbiene. As much as the
language itself fascinates me, the existence of a Yiddish theater
astonishes me. It is, as I’ve stated, what I believe to be an
entirely unique achievement in human cultural history.
[At
the end of Part 2, after I reiterate some the definitions of some
of the Yiddish words that have cropped up in the article, I name a
few useful sources and resources for anyone who is curious enough
to look further into this art form.]
Jewish
drama in Europe began in the Middle Ages with performances of the
traditional Purim play (Purimspiel),
the Biblical story of Esther, Mordechai, Ahasuerus, and Haman by
amateurs going from house to house. By the 16th century, these
itinerant performances, which included references to contemporary
matters as well as improvisations, songs, and dances, were
performed in Yiddish. I’m giving short shrift to the prehistory
of Jewish theater, but suffice it to say that during their sojourn
in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, the Jews of the Diaspora
came into contact with the theatrical entertainments of their host
countries from the Middle Ages on. During the 18th-century
Haskala, intellectuals wrote plays that extolled their beliefs,
but popular plays, ones that entertained and probed, began to
appear in the late 19th century. By the 19th century, the new
Jewish theater, following the tradition of the serious European
art theater in its dramatic writing and content, was equally
famous for its music. (There was a parallel development in Eastern
Europe of Jewish minstrelsy that grew out of the impromptu singing
and dancing performed at weddings. At a certain point, the two
traditions met.) Offerings ranged from revues to operettas to
musical comedies, melodramas to naturalist dramas to expressionist
and modernist plays.
Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908), a
Ukrainian journalist, teacher, and poet (whose poems had already
been set to music and become popular songs), is credited with
staging the first Yiddish play, a presentation of one of his own
musical scripts at a Romanian tavern in Iasi in 1876. The location
isn’t entirely coincidental as some of the foundational
influences for Jewish drama happened in Romania in the Middle
Ages: while Jews elsewhere in Europe had been barred from
attending the Christian religious performances, such as the
Passion Plays and the miracle, mystery, and morality plays that
were the origins of post-Roman European theater, the Romanian
Orthodox Church wasn’t so restrictive and Romanian Jews saw
these seminal performances. In any case, the Iasi presentation was
successful and Goldfaden, known as the father of Yiddish theater,
soon established the first professional Yiddish theater troupe
there, though he later moved his base to Bucharest. Decades later,
Bucharest is one of the three remaining centers of Yiddish
theater, with Tel Aviv and New York.
The Jews of Europe
being among the most literate people—out of necessity, many
spoke three or four tongues—and Yiddish having been established
as a literary language, this new art form was immediately
appealing. A few Jews were familiar with the theater of their home
cultures, but for most, literary pursuit meant books and prose.
Within a few years of Goldfaden’s success in Romania, however,
the idea of Jewish theater spread abroad. Goldfaden himself was
urged to come to other cities like Warsaw and Vilnius to start
Yiddish theaters and his Romanian company toured frequently,
playing taverns and cafés across Eastern and Central Europe.
Since the Ashkenazim shared common experiences despite their
different countries of residence, the new Yiddish plays traveled
easily and the successful playwrights immediately gained
international followings. This spurred more Yiddish theaters to
open and Goldfaden’s scripts were also published, spreading the
idea of Yiddish plays and playwriting even further. Almost
immediately, other Yiddish theaters popped up all over the
Ashkenazi diaspora, prompting a simultaneous burgeoning of Yiddish
playwriting to fill the little stages from Moscow to Berlin and
beyond, stretching all the way to Vienna, Paris, London, and
finally New York.
Joining a tide of Yiddish-speaking Jews
fleeing the wave of anti-Semitic pogroms that followed the
assassination in Russia of Czar Alexander II in 1881, Abraham
Goldfaden emigrated to America. (In 1883, the government of Czar
Alexander III banned Yiddish theater. The ban was lifted in 1904.)
By 1887, two established companies from Eastern Europe had already
crossed the Atlantic to set up in New York City—comedian Sigmund
Mogulesko (1848-1914), from Moldavia via Romania, and his dramatic
co-star, David Kessler (1860-1920), also Moldavian, were playing
on the Bowery at the Rumania Opera House and a smaller troupe was
working out of the Oriental Theatre. Goldfaden attempted to put
his work on in New York in 1887, but the success he had in Europe
eluded him here. His last play, however, Ben
Ami (1907), opening five days
before his death, was well-regarded in a production directed by
Boris Thomashefsky, the première actor-director of the Jewish
Broadway, Second Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many
other playwrights arose, a number of them following Goldfaden to
the United States and New York City, fast becoming the world
capital of the Yiddish stage.
In 1880, there were 240,000
Jews in the United States, 60,000 of them in New York City. New
York already had the largest concentration of Jews in the world,
all from different countries with different languages. Between
1880 and 1910, the Golden Age of Yiddish theater, one-third of all
the Jews in Eastern Europe had emigrated, 90% of them to the U.S.
They were a ready-made audience for the migrating Yiddish theaters
expelled from Eastern Europe. Much of the early stage fare were
translated, often bowdlerized versions of European plays—but
they offered astonishing talent, with the likes of Boris
Thomashefsky (1868-1939), who arrived in New York from Russia in
1881 as a 12-year-old, and his wife, Bessie (1874-1962); and Jacob
Adler (1855-1926), two of whose children, Stella (1901-92) and
Luther (1903-84), became both famous and influential on the
English-speaking stage and in Hollywood. (Stella Adler, a founding
member of the Group Theatre, became one of America’s most
respected acting teachers and one of the world’s most important
interpreters of the Stanislavsky system of acting.) In 1899, the
United States’ first actors’ union was formed by the Yiddish
performers; the Hebrew Actors Union fought for actors’ rights 14
years before the Actors’ Equity Association was founded.
Audiences began to include
non-Yiddish-speakers and by 1900, there were three professional
Yiddish theater troupes on New York City’s Lower East Side,
charging from 25 cents for the gallery to a dollar for orchestra
seats. In 1918, there were as many as 20 companies in the city,
presenting over a thousand performances which brought in two
million spectators from across the entire spectrum of Jewish
society. The strip of 15 Yiddish theaters along Second Avenue
between about 6th and 14th Streets was dubbed “The Yiddish
Rialto” and New York’s Yiddish theater became a significant
cultural establishment not just for the Jewish population, but the
entire city. (Indeed, it benefited the entire country eventually.
Vaudeville in the ’30s and ’40s and TV comedy of the ’50s
inherited the talent that had been honed by New York’s Yiddish
stages. Broadway and Hollywood did well from Second Avenue as
well, with stars like the Adlers and Muni Weisenfreund—better
known as Paul Muni.)
The young Thomashefsky, still only a
child himself, orchestrated the emigration of two Romanian
brothers with theatrical backgrounds and when they arrived in 1882
with four other actors, the boy, who’d never seen a play
himself, persuaded a neighborhood tavern-owner to hire a hall and
produce a play, Goldfaden’s Koldunye
(The Witch,
1877). It was such a success, despite stiff opposition from
upper-class German Jews who looked upon Yiddish theater as
undignified, that Thomashefsky’s credited with staging the first
Yiddish theatrical performance in New York. No older than 13,
Thomashefsky became the first impresario of New York’s Yiddish
theater. He took the new company on tours to Philadelphia;
Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Pittsburgh; Boston; and Chicago,
playing before enthusiastic audiences of working-class Jews.
Besides original plays by Goldfaden and others, Thomashefsky’s
troupe, one of the most celebrated of the many then playing in New
York City and touring the country, also presented Yiddish
adaptations of such works as Hamlet
(called The Yeshiva Student),
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Faust,
and Oscar Wilde’s Salome,
starring a hugely successful Bessie Thomashefsky in the title
role. (Many of the adaptations, like King
Lear or Hedda
Gabler, were given
haimishe—‘homely’
in the sense of ‘warm,’ but here connoting ‘happy’—endings.)
Still, while the English-speaking audiences uptown were seeing
lightweight comedies or melodramas like Alias
Jimmy Valentine or The
Heart of Maryland, the Jews on the
Lower East Side were seeing the work of modern European writers
such as Shaw, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Gorki, along with the new
Yiddish works of Ansky, Asch, Aleichem, Pinski, and others.
Though adaptations of European classics dominated the fare
on the Yiddish stage, a practice often disparaged by the Jewish
intellectual class, that began to change drastically around 1890,
the start of the Golden Age of Yiddish theater. Jacob Gordin
(1853-1909) took his lead from the best Russian theater, including
the Moscow Art Theater of Konstantin Stanislavsky which was
already reforming the theater of the western world. His début
play for the New York theater, Siberia
(1891), incorporating some of the style of secular Yiddish
literature, was the first realistic play about Jewish life of the
day (though by today’s standards, it was full of melodramatic
plot elements). His Yiddish King
Lear (Der
Yidisher Kenig Lir, 1892) wasn’t
a translation of Shakespeare but an original play inspired by the
Elizabethan classic. Gordin’s central character is Dovid
Moishele, a wealthy Jewish merchant in 19th-century Russia, the
family patriarch and a most familiar figure to the East European
theatergoers.
Though Gordin’s plays demanded sincerity on
stage and attention from their audiences, he wasn’t above
incorporating comic and musical elements to appeal to the
spectators. The plays, both Gordin’s and those of other popular
Yiddish dramatists, were most often about family life and
problems—one popular theme was the generational conflict between
American-born children and their old-country parents—with
characters that resembled the playgoers and their neighbors, and
situations they saw around them. Topical events also found
expression on the Yiddish stage: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire and the sinking of the Titanic
were both subjects of downtown dramas. Some of the plays were
serious art and others were shund,
trash, but the theater quickly became the cultural core of the
Ashkenazim’s life in America. Playwright Isaiah Sheffer (b.
1935), a child actor on the Yiddish stage who eventually became
artistic director of Symphony Space, explained that he went to
Yiddish theater “for great depth of feeling, a richness of
feeling. The idea of fullness, richness and overflowing table.”
The great director Harold Clurman (1901-80), describing his own
response to the output of Second Avenue, said that “it really
satisfied and responded to the needs and the feelings and
sentiments and the hopes of the people. It was not an
entertainment or a pastime. It was a necessity.” Broadway actors
came downtown to have a look and the New York press began to take
serious note of this rival to Broadway as the English-language
papers began running reviews of Yiddish performances around
1900.
The Yiddish Rialto also had its own culture, much
like Broadway’s uptown. There was even a “Sardi’s of Second
Avenue”—the Cafe Royale on East 12th Street—where fans and
artists hung out after performances and between gigs. (The famous
coffee shop was fictionalized in the 1942 play—revived on
Broadway in 1989—and 1964 musical Cafe
Crown.) The world of Yiddish
theater was a separate universe, possibly an escape from the
drudgery of daily life or the reality of the bleak world the
immigrants had so recently left behind. In fact, more than
Broadway, the Yiddish theater resembled the world of Kabuki, in
which the actors’ children went into the family business as soon
as they could manage to cross the stage. Lulla Rosenfeld, the late
granddaughter of Jacob Adler and his colleague and friend Abba
Schoengold (her parents were Adler’s daughter Frances and
Schoengold’s son, Joseph), recounted that her sister Pearlie
“made her debut at the age of 2, and created an uproar when,
forgetting her role, she addressed Jacob Adler as ‘Zayde’
(Grandpa) . . . .” (The error brought laughter and “a rain of
coins” from the audience.) The few Yiddish artists who married
outside the profession introduced the spouses to the theater
immediately and soon found an excuse to get them on stage. At the
other end of history, sadly, is the burial ground, Block 67 at
Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, maintained by the Yiddish
Theatrical Alliance (a branch of the HAU) exclusively for artsts
and stage hands of the Yiddish theater.
The theater
managers engaged in publicity wars with one another over their
stars on posters and handbills and in the press, and insults to
rival actors at another theater were inserted into scripts.
Devoted fans, called patrioten,
truly adored their stage stars; many were fans of particular
actors and would even yell advice from their seats at critical
moments (much the way Japanese patrons of Kabuki might shout out
encouragement or criticism at performers). Just as in a Kabuki-za,
spectators ate and drank, exchanged loud remarks, and shamelessly
cheered and booed the performers. Patrioten
rabidly defended their favorite’s turf to all boosters of anyone
else, even resorting to tossing a rival patriot
out of the auditorium. Once a well-known patriot
of actor David Kessler, Jacob Adler’s chief rival famous for his
histrionics, turned coat and began supporting Adler, known for his
dignity and reserve on stage. This was such an upheaval in the
sphere of Yiddish theater, it got full-page coverage in the Jewish
press.
Not only were productions quickly sold out, even
among the working-class immigrants for whom the 25-cent ticket
price was a small fortune, but the stars’ off-stage luster
helped raise up their fans and the whole Jewish community. As I
noted, many of the later stars—the Marx Brothers, Molly Picon,
Paul Muni, Fyvush Finkel; even Leonard Nimoy and Tovah Feldshuh
had a taste of the Yiddish stage in their youths—moved on to
stardom on Broadway or Hollywood, but the star that shone
brightest on Second Avenue was Jacob Adler, an émigré from
Latvia via London in 1889. His performances in such Yiddish
classics as The Yiddish King Lear
moved audiences beyond control.
It’s reported that one spectator ran toward the stage
bellowing:To hell with your
stingy daughter, Yankel! She has a stone, not a heart. Spit on
her, Yankel, and come home with me. My yidene
will feed you. Come Yankel, may she
choke, that rotten daughter of yours.
(“Yankel”
is the common nickname for Jacob, Yakov in Yiddish. Yidene
is a derogatory term for a Jewish woman, somewhat more insulting
than “old lady.”) In 1901, Adler performed the role of Shylock
in a Yiddish translation of The
Merchant of Venice at the People’s
Theatre on the Bowery. So successful was his portrayal of “The
Jew of Venice” as a man driven not by revenge but pride,
motivated, in the words of the New
York Times review, to vindicate
“Israel against the despiteful usage of the Christian merchant
and his friends,” that he was invited to repeat the performance
on Broadway and in May 1903, Adler appeared at the American
Theatre on West 42nd Street in a production where he spoke in
Yiddish and the other actors responded in English. When Adler, who
had been nicknamed Nesher Hagodl,
Hebrew for “The Great Eagle” (Adler
is German and Yiddish for ‘eagle’), died in 1926, hundreds of
thousands of New Yorkers gathered to view his body as it lay in
state for two days at the HAU.
But the New York Yiddish
theater also presented the particular world of the American Jew,
expressing pride in both the people’s Jewishness and their
Americanness. Patriotism for their new land, keenly felt because
of the freedoms they found (despite what we would recognize as
casual and societal anti-Semitism and general xenophobia—far
less than the new Jewish Americans had left behind in Europe) and
the opportunities they had to express themselves artistically and
intellectually, was expressed in plays like Boris Thomashefsky’s
Der Yidisher Yenki Dudl (1905).
The United States’ entrance into World War I in 1917 found the
Stars and Stripes adorning every Lower East Side stage as Yiddish
stars sold thousands of dollars of Liberty Bonds and raised large
sums for the Red Cross. They could look with pride at fellow
immigrant Irving Berlin (1888-1989), whom George M. Cohan had
dubbed “the Yidishe Yankee Doodle,” and his raft of
popular—and often patriotic—American songs and Broadway
scores.
At its height of popularity, up to about the Second
World War, Yiddish theater spawned as many as 200 troupes in New
York City and around the U.S. Today, the only producing Yiddish
company in New York City is the Folksbiene, founded in 1915 on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There were over a dozen companies
in New York City when the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre formed, an
arm of the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring, a socialist-oriented
labor organization founded in 1900. (Another company, the Yiddish
National Theatre, was affiliated with a different labor
organization, the now-defunct Hebrew Actors Union.) Remember that
the large majority of Yiddish-speaking immigrants were
working-class people laboring for wages and their culture
reflected that. It’s this association to which I was referring
when I suggested earlier that there’d been a practical effect of
Yiddish literature’s leftist proclivity.
After the
genocide of World War II destroyed most of the European
Yiddish-speaking community, the pool of both writers and
performers, as well as spectators, who spoke Yiddish diminished.
(In 1921’s Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924,
Congress had imposed restrictions on immigration from Eastern
Europe.) American Jews had meanwhile become so assimilated that
they preferred the English-language theater (as was true of most
ethnic groups who arrived in the mass immigration of the turn of
the century) and many of the stars of the Yiddish theater
transferred to the English-speaking stage and Hollywood. In 1959,
two of the most prominent Yiddish theater buildings on Second
Avenue were demolished (initially for parking lots); in 1985, the
last Yiddish play was produced on Second Avenue; in 1996, the same
year the Hebew Actors Union went out of business, the Yiddish
Rialto’s last theater was torn down.
Like many of the
small theaters in New York City and around the country,
Folksbiene, thought to be New York City’s longest
continuously-producing theater troupe of any kind, began as an
amateur company. It soon became a semi-professional outfit, first
hiring renowned directors like Joseph Buloff (1899-1985) and Jacob
Ben-Ami (1890-1972), followed by professional actors. Its earliest
commitment was to present plays of literary worth, including
Yiddish versions of classics from other cultures, though it now
produces more popular fare to attract a wider audience.
Folksbiene—the name, as I explained in my introduction, is
Yiddish for “the people’s stage”—became an independent,
not-for-profit theater in 1998, hiring a professional staff
(currently about 10 personnel) and acting company. It embarked on
a program of modernization in an effort to expand its audience.
Having renamed itself the National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene
in 2006, its modern mission, as stated on the company’s own
website, is “to preserve, promote and develop Yiddish theatre
for current and future generations.” Toward this end, along with
the more liberal repertory, Folksbiene has also added supertitles
in English and Russian for theatergoers who don’t understand
Yiddish. Formerly housed in a midtown synagogue on the East Side,
the company has been nomadic for several seasons now but has
raised around $2 million towards building its own permanent
performance space. The troupe, one of just five professional
Yiddish theaters in the world still operating, currently presents
one main play a year during the winter (though it also has other
programs).
Folksbiene says that these efforts have
increased their audiences threefold. In 2007, the theater won the
Drama Desk Special Award “for preserving for 92 consecutive
seasons the cultural legacy of Yiddish-speaking theatre in
America”; its 2006 mounting of Di
Yam Gazlonim, a Yiddish adaptation
of The Pirates of Penzance,
was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of
a Musical. Though the troupe’s original focus was on preserving
and memorializing the traditional Yiddish theater culture, both
the popular work and the classical plays, it has turned in recent
years to original work that continues the tradition in modern
ways. In 2011, for example, Folksbiene presented a co-production
with Theater for a New Audience of a new klezmer musical, Robert
Brustein’s Shlemiel the First,
an English-language adaptation of a story by Isaac Beshevis
Singer. Folksbiene artistic director Zalmen Mlotek, a Yiddish
music specialist and conductor, explained: “We’re encouraging
young artists to use the Yiddish culture and reinterpret it for
the widest possible audience.” Its outreach efforts include
bringing Yiddish shows to communities outside of New York City and
offering free performances at colleges. Folksbiene has also
expanded its offerings beyond theater to include concerts,
literary programs, and children’s performances (Kids &
Yiddish) in an effort to redirect its emphasis to the whole of
Yiddish culture.
.
Coming up on its 100th anniversary,
Folksbiene has announced plans for an international Jewish arts
festival in 2015. Kulturfest: The First Chana Mlotek International
Festival of Jewish Performing Arts will include performances and
workshops exploring Jewish identity through the arts. (Chana
Mlotek, the mother of Folksbiene’s Zalmen Mlotek, is the music
archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.) The company
anticipates a week of celebration featuring 100 concerts, film
screenings, and theater events, though fundraising isn’t
complete yet. One question the plans raise, however, is embedded
in the festival’s proposed name. As Jewish novelist Thane
Rosenbaum, who writes frequently about Jewish culture, phrased it:
“Is there is a distinctly Jewish art today, and what is its
connection to Yiddish?”
The concepts of “Jewish” and
“Yiddish” aren’t identical, though they clearly overlap. If
nothing else, of course, “Jewish culture” must include not
just Ashkenazi and Sephardi arts, but the creative work of
Mizrahim (the Jews from Muslim-majority lands of the Middle East)
and even the Falashas (the Jewish sect that arose in Ethiopia),
among the many Jewish sects and communities around the world whose
language isn’t Yiddish. (There are, for instance, centuries-old,
indigenous Jewish societies in India and China.) “Jewish”
theater, for instance, can be written in any language—there’s
a lot of it in English, for example—and be creatively based in
any nation, even as the Yiddish theater can be. But shouldn’t
“Yiddish” theater be written exclusively in Yiddish?
Traditionally, it also depicts the Ashkenazi world, either of the
past or the present, though there’s no reason it must. As
Rosenbaum put the query: “Is this really about world Jewish
culture?” or “Is this just homage to Yiddish culture?” Does
the use of Yiddish automatically make something Jewish? Shane
Baker, executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture,
declared, “I’m a gentile fluent in Yiddish, and I play in
Yiddish theater” and suggested, “I imagine one of the things
they’ll be looking at is what is Jewish culture.” (It’s
provocative to note that the official announcement of the
Kulturfest plans came at a gala Town Hall concert in honor of,
among others, pop singer Neil Sedaka, a Sephardic Jew—raised,
curiously enough, in an Ashkenazi-influenced home).
Another
provocative question, pertinent more today in this time of
assimilation and homogenization, is raised by Theodore Bikel, the
actor and folksinger: “Is someone a Jewish artist or a Jew who
happens to create music or books?” Was Death
of a Salesman a Jewish play (Willy
“Lohmann”?) because Arthur Miller was a Jew? Is Barefoot
in the Park a Jewish comedy because
Neil Simon’s Jewish? West Side
Story was famously written and
staged by five Jews. It’s hardly a Jewish play, I wouldn’t
say. (All five artists were also gay. Is West
Side Story a gay musical?) On the
other hand, Fiddler on the Roof is
surely a Jewish play and story—albeit with universal themes and
appeal. But when it opened in Tokyo, Japanese theatergoers and
critics reportedly declared, “It’s so Japanese”! (A recent
Broadway revival of Fiddler
was mounted with no Jews among the principle artists engaged in
the staging. It was humorously dubbed “Goyim on the Roof” and,
coincidently or not, roundly criticized for its lack of
personality and verve. Goy
is the slightly derogatory—“condescending” is perhaps a
kinder adjective, remembering that Yiddish words never have a
single translation—Yiddish term for ‘gentile.’)
Is
there even still a “Yiddish culture”? Thane Rosenbaum reminds
us, “It is still a dying language,” spoken in fewer and fewer
households, especially outside the Hasidic world. Rosenbaum also
asks, “Are there original plays being written in Yiddish?” The
theatrical section of the Mount Hebron Cemetery is steadily
filling up as the practitioners of Yiddish theater dwindles. Could
there possibly be a resurgence? Does it matter? Is the long and
stunning history enough to justify the celebration or even the
existence of an organization like Folksbiene? As I admitted,
Yiddish and the Yiddish theater have intrigued me most of my adult
life—yet I never learned the language. Are most Jews like me? Is
the Folksbiene fighting a losing battle, sticking a finger in a
dyke that's going to burst anyway? Are we getting ready to say, as
one Mount Hebron epithaph reads, “The play is done, the curtain
drops slow, falling to the prompter’s bell.” Sentimentally, I
hope not. Realistically? “God alone knows,” as Hodel, Tevye’s
daughter, says in Fiddler.[I’ve
tried to make clear what I’ve meant by the Yiddish words and
phrases I salted through “The National Yiddish Theatre –
Folksbiene,” either by defining them specifically or carefully
situating them in context. Still, just to be safe, let me go over
some of them again, in the order in which they appear above. Bear
in mind that a) English spellings will vary and b) no Yiddish word
has a simple, one-dimensional meaning.
[Folksbiene,
the company’s name, means ‘people’s stage.’ Mame-loshen
refers to the Yiddish
language, the ‘mother tongue.’ A mavin
is an ‘expert,’ a ‘knowledgeable person.’ Haimishe
means ‘humble,’ ‘homey,’ ‘comfortable.’ Yidishe
(note the single d)
is the Yiddish word for both ‘Yiddish’ and ‘Jewish’; only
the context reveals the proper sense. (Yid
is the word for ‘Jew,’ though it’s usually an offensive name
if pronounced with a short i
as in ‘kid,’ the way anti-Semites say it; if pronounced in
Yiddish, “yeed,”
it’s neutral.) Shund
means ‘trash’ or ‘rubbish.’ A zayde
is a ‘grandfather,’ though it can be used as a term of
endearment for any old man. Patrioten
(plural of patriot)
means ‘fans’ as in ‘devotees’ and shouldn’t be confused
with the English cognate it looks like. Yidene
is an ‘old woman’ and is always a put-down in the sense that
“my yidene”
would be the equivalent of a man calling his wife “my old lady.”
Klezmer
music is traditional Ashkenazi folk music and hymns played by
itinerant groups of three to six musicians playing trumpets,
bugles, flutes, clarinets, fifes, violins, cellos, or drums. (The
name comes from the Hebrew for ‘musical instrument.’)
Originally, the players were untrained and the groups informal,
though today the musicians are trained and the music is notated.
Goy
(pl.: goyim)
is the way Jews refer to a ‘gentile’ or a ‘non-Jew’ and it
can carry a condescending, even insulting connotation, depending
on whether it’s spoken with a sneer or a smile.
[There
are lots of books and articles about the three main topics I’ve
covered in “The National Yiddish Theatre”—the Yiddish
language, Yiddish literature, and Yiddish theater—too many to
list. For the language, one of the most amusing—and still
informative—is Leo Rosten’s The
Joys of Yiddish. It’s principally
a vocabulary with wonderful examples of the uses of a word or
phrase, but it also has encyclopedia-like articles about many
surprising aspects of Yiddish culture and language and Jewish life
and history. Another fun book, if you can find a copy, is Martin
Marcus’s Yiddish for Yankees.
For Yiddish theater, I recommend starting with Vagabond
Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater by
Nahma Sandrow. Lulla Rosenfeld’s biography of her grandfather,
Bright Star of Exile: Jacob Adler
and the Yiddish Theatre is also a
fascinating and engaging entrée into that world. Most libraries,
especially university collections, have excellent resources on
these subjects, and the New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish
Division at the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building (5th Avenue at
42nd Street) is easily one of the best collections of Judaica in
the U.S., but for all three subjects, plus anything else about
Yiddish culture (food, music, poetry) or Jewish customs and life,
check out the Center for Jewish History in New York City (15 W.
16th Street); CJH includes the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research.]
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Rick
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