Kashu-juku Noh Theater at the Perelman (1st review)

What 700-year-old Eastern art form has impacted a broad range of 20th Century Western theater and music? Playwrights and theater directors from Brecht to O'Neil to Grotowski to Peter Brook have felt its influence. Composers from Messiaen to Britten to Stockhausen to David Byrne have fallen under its sway.

The answer, of course, is Noh theater, an aesthetic borne of feudal times in 14th-Century Japan.

It was the mystique of Noh as well as my own demon curiosity that brought me to the Perelman Theater on a cool March evening, when winter was in retreat before a tentative spring. Thanks to the prescient initiative of Dustin Hurt and his flowering Bowerbird presenting group of experimental music, dance and film, in conjunction with the Kimmel Center, a packed house was mesmerized by a sampling of Kyoto's Kashu-juku Noh Theater, led by Katayama Shingo of the Katayama Noh family, and joined by kyogen actors from the Shigeyama family. The all-male, 19-member troupe next brought this program to Manhattan at a time when Japanese culture asserts its resilience in the face of the recent earthquake and tsunami.

Warring clans

The opening work, Yashima, was presented in a stripped down concert version format called mai-bayashi (literally "music and dance"), sans costumes and masks. It generated such intensity and interest that one felt robbed at its brevity as an opener.

It presented the excerpted, climactic scene of a Noh work, a 12th-Century battle scene between two warring clans told through the spirit of Yoshitsune, the greatest general in Japanese military history, as performed by Umewaka Naoyoshi. The story of the battle on an ocean is intoned through the spoken poetry and minimalist dance of the general as well as by musicians, two drummers and a flutist, plus a small chorus, all on stage as visually engaging theatrical presences in close proximity to the principal character (shite).

The seemingly arrhythmic hand drums provided sharp percussive sounds punctuated by guttural vocalizing and striking arm gestures that, when joined with silences, gradually generated more detectable rhythms. The poetry intertwined the imagery of war and nature where "metallic helmets appear like stars in the sky" and a "raft of seagulls" offered the illusion of an army on the waters.

The too-short general

The story itself evaded exactness. The Perelman's subtitles explained that the general lost his archery bow and sought to retrieve it in the waters, at risk to his own life to avoid its possession by the enemy.

But in a pre-performance talk, the Penn Japanese studies professor Linda Chance offered an alternative narrative of a buck-toothed general of very diminished height, with a bow reflecting his shortened stature, who out of excessive pride sought the lost bow to prevent the enemy from learning his true height. This delightful variance suggested either the ambiguities of the original text or subjective interpretations of later readers or translators, either one adding to the rich layering of Noh poetry. The power of the general's monochromatic delivery was complemented by his strident dance, which was but a weighted walk that needed only to change on a diagonal to bestow its force.

Gleeful silliness

Kyogen ("wild words" or "mad speech") is the comic Marx Brothers theater form that turns Noh on its head, reducing its structures and imperatives to gleeful silliness. Using pantomime and 15th-Century colloquial language, the aikyogen served as interludes during Noh plays— which could go on all day, or as separate plays between Noh works.

Here, in Boshibari ("Tied to a Pole"), two servants get tied up, one to his own pole that he has used to perfect his pole fighting, so that they cannot steal the master's sake while he's away from the house. Nevertheless, their successful efforts at getting drunk are worthy of the classic comic timing and varying vocal, singsong pitches of an Abbott and Costello. The servants' first awareness of their master's reappearance arises from his floating reflection in a jar of sake.

Wagnerian sense

With the third piece— a segment from the great Noh work Aoi No Ue (Lady Aoi), which uses costumes and masks, chorus and the hayashi instrumentalists (transverse flute, hip drum, shoulder drum and stick drum)— one begins to experience Noh in the Wagnerian sense of Gesamtkunstwerk.

In this adaptation from the classic Tale of Genji, we are thrust into a scene co-habited by both humans and spirits, where a demonic Living Spirit of Lady Rokujo (played by a masked Katayama Shingo) wreaks revenge out of jealousy upon both the spirit and body of Lady Aio. In this imaginative world, Aio is represented by a length of red cloak unfolded onto the front of the stage as the first character appearing.

A sorceress fails to cure Aio of the curse set upon her, until Lady Rokujo is confronted by a chanting Buddhist priest who seeks to save Rokujo but only through a battle with her of fixed glances, confrontational walks and retreating steps. The chorus and hayashi reinforce through spoken poetry and sound the heightened clash of a vengeful spirit in opposition to the power of prayer that seeks a salvation.

There's a surprising power in the reduced dynamic and tonalities of the speech and music, and in the equally reduced movement, most manifested in the masks. The defeated spirit of Lady Rokujo need only tilt her mask slightly downward to communicate her resignation in the face of redemptive prayer.

A Philadelphia future?

A bit of divining among the Perelman Theater audience during intermission revealed Philadelphia's legendary theater spirit, Greg Giovanni, founder of Big Mess Theater, who has studied and performed Noh for the past 14 years— mostly the comic kyogen roles. Giovanni works with Theater Noh-gaku, a company of actors outside Philadelphia who will perform in Japan and China later in the year. He reports that he has written a Noh play, Pine Barrens, about New Jersey's mythical red devils, so perhaps Noh has a future in Philadelphia.♦


To read another review by Marshall A. Ledger, click here.