Word: kabuki
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Over the centuries, there have been two kinds of theater, the elitist and the vulgarian. In Aristophanic comedies, male characters were endowed with huge prop phalli with which they thwacked each other. Early forms of the Kabuki theater were closed down by the shogun in 17th century Japan for encouraging prostitution and inciting lewd homosexual byplay on and off stage. Italy's commedia dell'arte was frequently obscene in word and gesture...
...forms Senelick has chosen to convey ritual are highly derivative: he has borrowed Oriental Kabuki gestures for Oedipus and locasta, and this works very well, stylizing their "act" of semi-divinity almost to satire. For the Chorus he has assimilated the chanting and stick-beating rhythms of the Open Theater, the serpentine body piles of the Living Theater, and the copulation mime of Marat/Sade. All are dramatically sound, but one is aware of their unoriginality...
...Sandy Duncan, who plays Polly's friend Maisie. She is a winning girl with a saucy comic style and enough sizzling energy to set the floorboards smoking. All of the dance numbers are a delight, though they have been meticulously stylized, rather as if a Kabuki troupe had been taught to do the Charleston. The evening's fun is poured sparingly, except when Sandy Duncan sluices it out in a champagne flood...
Every little gesture has meaning in Kabuki theater, and the twitch of an eyebrow can be as electric as a lightning bolt. One of the stars of the company, Baiko, is a master of this sign language, and he plays Hangan with expressively poignant force. With staggering ease, Baiko also dominates the second number on the program, Kagami-Jishi (The Mirror Lion Dance), in which he plays a shy flower-loving maiden who turns into the king of beasts. (All female roles are played by men in Kabuki theater.) The three-stringed twang of the samisen haunts the entire evening...
...Grand Kabuki illuminates the paradox in the Japanese character, an outward decorum of almost inhuman restraint masking an inner fury of almost demonic feelings. Out of this tension the Japanese fashioned the peculiar beauty of their drama, rather like the Greeks, whose tragedies distilled the moral of "nothing in excess" from a people capable of nothing but excess...