Theater Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
A little background first:
Ako is a vastly experienced Japanese actress, born and raised in Tokyo, deeply trained in traditional Japanese dance and theater. As is common among her countrymen’s performers, she’s also adept in Western-style projects. Most recently, she was acclaimed for her dramatic performance in the award-winning TV series Shogun. Her background includes membership in Japan’s world-famous, all-female musical theater company, Takarazuka, where women play both male and female roles, even macho characters like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.
Wishing to introduce Japanese theater—modern and traditional—to New York audiences, Ako created a company called Amaterasu-za, which, with local actors of Japanese heritage, performs mainly in Japanese, with English projected titles, and occasional explanations in English. Amaterasu is the name of the sun goddess whose story of emerging from a sealed cave when she heard godly music and laughter outside has long been considered the origin of Japanese theater.
The company’s productions have included Yukio Mishima’s modern noh plays and a staging of the classic kabuki and bunraku revenge play Chūshingura, about the fabled 47 ronin. Given the challenge of presenting historical material, like Chūshingura, in Japanese, with their need for a semblance of period costumes, even on a bare stage, one can only respect Ako’s ambitions. The results, however, may leave something to be desired.
And there’s something to be desired in Ako and her company’s latest effort, Okuni: The Woman Who Created Kabuki, written by Ako, who also directed and stars. Her play is a highly fictionalized account of the temple dancer (miko) known as Izumo no Okuni (Okuni from Izumo), who is credited with planting the seed that grew into kabuki theater following her move to Kyoto in 1603. Her revolutionary approach, which transformed traditional religious dance and chant into a secular genre, gained enormous popularity after it was introduced in the dry river bed of the Kamo River.
Playing on a crude adaptation of a noh stage, she and her actors sometimes cross-dressed—a famous image of Okuni in male garb is on the program cover—in sketches set among courtesans in the pleasure quarters. Her shows, called “kabuki”—borrowed from a word meaning “offbeat” to describe the looks and manners of certain roguish men called kabukimono—were soon rivaled by all-prostitute companies. Then came the all-boy companies, who further sexualized kabuki. By 1629, women were banned from the stage; then, for similar reasons having to do with their presence disturbing the peace, the boys were banned as well. By the 1650s, only all-adult male companies were permitted, leading to kabuki’s development as a serious art form, women’s roles being taken by men who brought the art of playing women to new heights. Thus, a great art founded by a woman achieved renown when women were no longer in it, a tradition still practiced.
Details of Okuni’s life and accomplishments have been debated by scholars for many years. Even her birth and death dates are uncertain. The years 1607 and 1613 are sometimes cited for when she died; there’s even a theory she died a nun in her native town at 87. This latter seems to have served Ako’s version, which shows the aged Okuni talking to Kanbei, an equally geriatric swordsmith of Izumo. It’s one of a number of questionable elements in Okuni: The Woman Who Created Kabuki.
Okuni is a two-actor piece, with Ako playing Okuni and—briefly—Lady Yodo, widow of Japan’s ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Yasushi Kimura—clearly trained in Japanese traditional theater and dance—portrays three roles: Kosuke, a performer of the pre-kabuki genre called dengaku; the dashing kabukimono Nagoya Sanzaburō; and Kanbei. Only the second of these existed, although his actual artistic/romantic association with Okuni remains speculative.
In addition to Ako and Kimura, an invaluable third performer, seated on her knees at stage right, is Fumi Tanakadate, a gifted young musician who accompanies the action on a variety of Japanese drums, as well as on the flute. Her musical accompaniment allows for a number of charming Japanese song and dance sequences by both actors. Ako even invites the seated audience to wave their arms and sing along (“Sore, sore, . . .”) to a folk song.
Ako’s program note says she’s not aiming at a “scholarly documentary,” but rather a “celebration of [Okuni’s] spirit.” All well and good, but, given that this is probably going to be the only play ever to present Okuni’s story to an American audience, shouldn’t there have been a somewhat more accurate account, using what little we do know? (Wikipedia has a good entry on Okuni, which you can find here). For those interested in an engrossing mixture of Okuni fact and fiction in a historical novel, I recommend James R. Brandon’s translation of Sawako Ariyoshi’s Kabuki Dancer: A Novel of the Woman Who Founded Kabuki; in Japanese: Izumo no Okuni. Instead, we get a play filled with so many anachronisms and fictional concoctions that visitors familiar with the Okuni facts and legends will find themselves squirming.
For instance, when Okuni learns that the government has chosen to ban women from the stage, no date is given; it was 1629, when Okuni—unlike in the play—was probably long gone. And when the play seeks to explain the etymology of the word “kabuki,” we’re told that Okuni decided to write it with the kanji characters for “song” (ka), “dance” (bu), and “act” (ki). Okuni, however, had nothing to do with that development, which happened many years later, “kabuki” being written until then in kana, the Japanese syllabary. In fact, the kanji for “act” was introduced only in the Meiji period (1868-1912), replacing the original “ki,” a similar-looking ideograph that—because of kabuki’s post-Okuni associations—stood for “prostitute.” Interestingly, people during the Edo period, when kabuki came into being, were more likely to call the genre shibai than kabuki.
Okuni’s early years, as she evolved from a traveling shrine dancer to a commercially successful secular dancer, are too superficially described in the play to be appreciated; although she was probably not a prostitute, Ako overlooks the fact that her performances’ sexuality contributed to their popularity. The suggestion that she did kyōgen plays like Hanago is highly doubtful. Even more improbable is her performance of noh plays, the one shown here being Hashi Benkei (Benkei on the Bridge). Both these titles were premiered—Hanago under the title Migawari Zazen (The Zen Substitute)—in kabuki versions in the early 20th century.
While Okuni was more a dancer than an actress, and led a large troupe of dancers (not a whiff of which is present here), she’s believed to have introduced proto-dramatic sketches, like the one in which a handsome young man comes to a teahouse in the pleasure quarters to arrange an assignation with a prostitute. These sketches would have been the limit of Okuni kabuki’s dramatic output. There is much speculation about her onstage interaction with Nagoya Sanzaburō, which I have no space to describe; still, what Ako shows of this has nothing to do with the far more fascinating legend about what their onstage performances might have involved. There are too many other historical problems to pursue here without being more boringly pedantic than I already am.
Okuni: The Woman Who Created Kabuki is simply too great a distortion of the facts we know to be a viable introduction to the person it’s intended to honor. As a play, it inclines toward grade-school didacticism, shallow characterizations, and excessive exposition, much of it performed at a turtle’s pace. Although Joshua Dachs is credited for the set, there’s not much scenery to speak of, just a few basic props placed before a horizontally striped Japanese curtain situated in front of a projection screen.
Aaron Bowersox did the basic lighting, and Cinthia Chen created the projections, which incorporate familiar ukiyo-e prints of landscapes, often with images of water that seems to be moving. The production supplies its actors with multiple costumes and wigs, all designed by Ako. Several wigs seem authentic enough, others are blatantly cheap-looking. Fortunately, there are enough other visual elements to provide at least a modicum of Japanese authenticity.
The potentially fascinating story of Okuni is wide-ranging, covering decades and requiring many more characters, splashes of theatrical color, and both comic and dramatic crises than are present in this dullish, choppy play. Restricting Okuni: The Woman Who Created Kabuki to a two-actor performance without a more novel conceptualization, even one with historical bloopers, makes this an irretrievably lost opportunity Japanophiles will mourn.
Okuni: The Woman Who Created Kabuki. Through November 23 at Theater Row (410 West 42nd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues). www.bfany.org
Photos: Russ Rowland
