Word: kabuki
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...heart transplant. It is socially as well as biologically instinctive to reject what is alien. One slightly condescending form of acceptance is to treat what is foreign as exotic. Culturally speaking, this makes one man's meat another man's persimmon. In many ways, the Grand Kabuki is a Japanese persimmon on a U.S. theatergoer's palate. It is a sweet, sumptuous and strange new taste sensation with which to start the Broadway season...
Dramatically, the Kabuki is most accessible to a Western audience when it mirrors human nature, and most baffling when it reflects the feudal social structure of 18th century Japan. In its painstakingly stylized way, the Grand Kabuki converts action and experience into a series of magnificent pictorial still lifes that remind one again and again of ukiyo-e, the "floating world" of Japanese prints. The paramount problem is tempo. Implacably loyal to its centuries-old tradition, the Kabuki imposes the pace of the palanquin on the age of the jet plane...
...most renowned play associated with this theater company is Chushingura, an 18th century saga of honor and bloody revenge that is almost Sicilian in tone. In its entirety, the play runs to eleven acts and two days, but only the first four acts are being performed by the Grand Kabuki during its current U.S. tour. The story is transparently simple. Moronao, the governor of Kamakura, lusts after Lady Kaoyo, the wife of Hangan, one of Moronao's deputies. She rebuffs him. Moronao is furious and showers abuse on the unsuspecting and inoffensive Hangan. Pushed beyond sense and patience, Hangan...
Thursday, August 14 NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.).* "The National Theater of the Deaf, Encore" presents talented actors who perform entirely in sign language a Kabuki drama and Anton Chekhov's monologue "On the Harmfulness of Tobacco...
...tortuous groping for an answer to the overwhelming question of God's existence." Wiggy Look. Clurman expected formidable difficulties: his Japanese vocabulary consists of only ten words. But communication was a comparative cinch. First, he had to pry his cast loose from the stylized posturing of the kabuki influence. "The actors would play for the audience instead of for each oth er," says Clurman. "This is just the opposite from the technique of modern re alism, in which the actors are supposed to play to each other as if there were no audience at all." Kabuki also goes...