‘Far from beauty & elegance’

Ikuko Kitagawa / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Yukio Ninagawa’s quirky and coquettish Shintoku-Maru is back. First staged 13 years ago, the Oedipal drama of a forbidden love between a boy and his stepmother was most recently run in 1997 and 2002.

“When [Shintoku-Maru Final] finished six years ago, I thought it would be the last time, and I put the role to bed. But we loved the play so much, so we’re very happy to be doing it again,” Kayoko Shiraishi–the only person in the play’s long run to play Nadeshiko, the stepmother–told The Daily Yomiuri ahead of an evening performance of Shintoku-Maru Fukkatsu (revival) at the Sai no Kuni Saitama Arts Theater.

The Japan performance, which stars Tatsuya Fujiwara as Shintoku, follows February’s performance at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington.

Shintoku-Maru keeps the veteran actress busy for the full 90 minutes of the performance, as she has to change kimono six times.

“I was worried about whether I was strong enough to perform again, but I decided I’d give it a shot,” said Shiraishi, who performs twice a day. “If it was only one staging a day, I might be able to do it in a couple of years, but it’ll be impossible for me to keep up this schedule next time.”

Surely, Shiraishi’s role is the most demanding of the play, as Nadeshiko has more dialogue and dances, and has to switch her persona between kind mother, evil woman and passionate lover.

The play is based on a centuries-old oral tradition that was adapted to the stage by Shuji Terayama and Rio Kishida. Nadeshiko is a traveling entertainer who is purchased by Shintoku’s father to be his wife. Shintoku misses his biological mother so much that he can’t make a connection with Nadeshiko, causing her to become jealous. This strong feeling eventually turns to lust.

“Mr. Ninagawa has designed a group of individual sets to suit Nadeshiko’s state of mind–for the evil woman who appears in Shintoku’s dream, the mother in day-to-day life, an amorous woman in a red-light district and a crazy woman,” she said, adding that it was impossible to perform Nadeshiko’s passion and madness with only one stage set.

Shiraishi said she had wanted to play the role of Nadeshiko for years–ever since she saw the kabuki play Sesshu Gappoga-Tsuji, which tells a similar story to Shintoku-Maru, in which a woman called Tamate-gozen falls in love with her stepson. Shiraishi was hoping to land the role, but at the same time was unsure how she should play a woman who falls in love with her stepson, expressing coquetry and psychological instability. Shiraishi said she tried to explore the character’s mentality, only to come to the conclusion that her acting was not yet up to par.

“I’ve long wondered at which age I would be able to play this role and kept the part in the back of my mind,” she said. “Then, the role of Nadeshiko fell into my lap as if it was a message from God.”

Shiraishi is known for playing eccentric and morbid characters, such as the offspring of a Greek god and a human, or a crazy queen who murders her husband. While Nadeshiko can certainly be counted among her other eccentric roles, the character also comes with a beautiful and heroic nature.

“I’d always dreamed of playing a princess,” said Shiraishi, recalling her childhood, when she wanted to play the heroine but was always cast as a hag. “Among my many roles, Nadeshiko may be the closest to what I would call a heroine.”

The character might be called a princess, too, the actress explains, saying there is a moment–when she is dressed up in her elaborate kimono, makeup and hairdo–that she feels like royalty.

“I like every one of Nadeshiko’s scenes, such as when she eats dinner with her family or goes crazy with her hair standing on end in Shintoku-Maru’s dream,” she says. “But in all seriousness, the final love scene with Shintoku-Maru, although it’s the hardest scene to play, is the big scene, as I play her as a seductive and passionate woman.”

In 1967, Shiraishi quit her job at the Minato Ward office to pursue a career as a stage actress, believing it was the best way to release her pent-up energy. Aspiring to the role of heroine, Shiraishi soon realized that she wanted to express something deeper than could be expressed by the often superficial role of heroine.

“I’d be a bore if I didn’t express a nature of humanity that is far from beauty and elegance,” she says.

In Shintoku-Maru, she says she cares a lot about Nadeshiko’s nature, which flip-flops crazily within the play.

Says Shiraishi, “I have to have dual and triple natures in my mind to successfully portray Nadeshiko’s character as it changes in a blink of an eye from the mundane to the surreal.”

“Shintoku-Maru Fukkatsu” runs until April 10 at Sai no Kuni Saitama Arts Theater in Saitama. No performance on Mondays. The closest station is JR Yono-Honmachi Station. Tickets start at 5,000 yen. For more information, call (03) 3490-4949.

Source: Yomiuri.co.jp

‘Shintoku-Maru’: At a Loss for Words

By Peter Marks

Among the adventurous conjurers of stage pictures, Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa surely ranks as world-class. The eerie sight of the conflicted young hero of “Shintoku-Maru” wandering an underworld of wagon-size boats, crowded with candles and what look like jellyfish dangling from long poles, speaks hauntingly in the universally incongruous language of tortured sleep.

Ninagawa’s estimable gift for spectacle is on display through tonight at the Kennedy Center in the U.S. premiere of the slightly uneven “Shintoku-Maru,” an adaptation by Rio Kishida of Shuji Terayama’s play based on a centuries-old Japanese story. It’s fortunate that the venue for this opening act of the center’s Japan festival is the Opera House, because the scale and emotional intensity of the piece — bordering on the histrionic — puts you in mind of the mighty winds of grand opera.

I’d love to say that the visual dimension of “Shintoku-Maru” was enough, but a half-hour into the production, I found myself craving more information than I had access to. Because of the language barrier, the compact, 90-minute work at times lulls you into a state of woozy indifference. A rather esoteric decision was made by the director not to provide a running English translation of “Shintoku-Maru’s” dialogue scenes. The intention for non-Japanese speakers seems to be an unadulterated immersion in Ninagawa’s refined design elements.

In some productions, words might indeed be secondary. (As a leftover from a presentation of the piece in London a decade ago, British actor Alan Rickman recorded a plot synopsis that is played before the show over the public-address system.) The fabric of “Shintoku-Maru,” however, is of some psychological complexity, and the protracted scenes in which the teenage Shintoku-Maru (Tatsuya Fujiwara) vents his feelings or engages in battles of will with his stepmother-to-be, Nadeshiko (Kayoko Shiraishi), cry out for the explication that much of an American audience is denied.

The melding in “Shintoku-Maru” of ways ancient and contemporary could also be felt more profoundly if we were more fully apprised of what was going on. The play documents the mixture of revulsion and sexual attraction that wells up in the young man upon the arrival of Nadeshiko, who’s been purchased by his father (Toru Shinagawa) as a replacement for his dead wife.

The scene of Nadeshiko’s selection from among a pool of available women (the program says they are “traveling players who have fallen on hard times”) is especially weird and wonderful. A wooden structure divided into stalls is wheeled into place, each stall containing a middle-aged woman, in the garish abstract mask of a seal, performing a domestic chore. (The seal, the program tells us, connotes in Japanese lore a householder’s rights.)

You get in this moment a sense of both the mundane and the exotic that “Shintoku-Maru” traverses. The evening is framed by two mesmerizing sequences in which a Fellini-esque parade of midgets, clowns, vagabonds, souvenir-hawkers and dancers advances to the lip of the stage and then retreats. Somehow, the torment in Shintoku-Maru’s imagination is expressed in the melancholy, imagistic world in which these fringe personalities also dwell.

Ninagawa alternates scenes of remarkable fantasy with those outlining the blander rituals of domestic life; the work is playing here with the changing nature of the traditional Japanese family. An agile crew rolls out the numerous modular pieces that come together as the screened rooms of Shintoku-Maru’s house. They are later separated again, to become the rooms of the many other families of the city, any one of which looks happier to the boy than his own.

The production’s voracious leads, Fujiwara and Shiraishi, circle each other warily, lashing out and pulling back, wounding, consolingly. (The intense accompaniment of Akira Miyagawa’s score occasionally puts too much accent on the melodramatic.) In concert, though, with the outstanding lighting by Sumio Yoshii and sets by Nobutaka Kotake, Ninagawa and his stars go a long way toward giving color and definition to a world that remains just beyond our reach.

Shintoku-Maru, by Shuji Terayama. Adapted by Rio Kishida. Directed by Yukio Ninagawa. Costumes, Lily Komine; sound, Masahiro Inoue; choreography, Kiyomi Maeda, Kinnosuke Hanayagi. With Kohta Nakasone, Kenichi Ishii. About 90 minutes. Through tonight at the Kennedy Center. Call 202-467-4600 or visit http://www.kennedy-center.org.

source: Washingtonpost.com

Hypercolor Tragedy: Shintoku-Maru @ The KenCen

Man, I had the craziest hallucination last night. Thing is, about 2,000 other people had it, too, and to give due credit, it wasn’t really my hallucination. It was Yukio Ninagawa’s. The multi-Olivier-award winning director, who picked up a knighthood from Her Majesty’s Government in 2002 for his bold reinterpretations of the likes of Twelfth Night and Medea (making him, um, Sir Yukio, we guess), has brought his Shintoku-Maru to the Kennedy Center for a brief run as part of the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture festival.

Adapted from an ancient Japanese noh play, Shintoku-Maru seems to incorporate bits of most of the Greek tragedies you kind of remember, but most obviously Oedipus Rex, its mommy-lust reworked into the marginally less gross stepmommy-lust. (The eye-gouging, you will be relieved to hear, remains intact.)

Aside from these familiar elements, much of the story here would likely be impenetrable even if weren’t performed entirely in Japanese without projected subtitles, which it is. Mercifully, the program contains a detailed synopsis. And if that isn’t enough help, the performance is prefaced by an audio recording of Hans Gruber himself, actor Alan Rickman, reading the lengthy plot summary aloud. Bizarre but awesome, rather like the 85 minutes that follow.

As Hans Gruber tells it, Shintoku-Maru is despondent after the death of his mom. When his elderly father decides to buy himself a new wife, he chooses Nadeshiko, a woman to which Shintoku feels a powerful attraction. Making matters worse is the fact that Shintoku’s dad isn’t much interested in attending to Nadeshiko’s womanly needs, which only adds to the tension between Nadeshiko and Shintoku.

You can probably guess what happens next. Yes, that’s correct! Shintoku does indeed go visit a magician who sells him a portal to the underworld so he can go looking for his dead mom.

And this is the point at which things start to get a little weird.

Flummoxed? Don’t sweat it; the plot really is sort of secondary. The real news here are the arresting sets and costumes, and especially Nanagawa’s inimitable way of choreographing all these elements into a visual symphony of the grotesque. (There’s a display of the costumes in the lobby, so you can check ‘em out up close.)

The street scenes that bookend the show give us a sort of funeral parade of traveling players and mask-sellers and guys equipped with those metal-sander tools that seem to have no practical purpose other than to rain sparks for use in late-80s hair-band videos. It’s jaw-dropping. Musically, the show is the Japanese answer to Andrew Lloyd Webber: Grating, bombastic pseudo-rock without a trace of roll. We cannot tell a lie: To this pair of Western, Webber-hating ears, it sounds awful. But did we mention that it all looks spectacular?

Tatsuya Fujiwara, who plays the title role, has gone on to become a star in Japan since making his stage debut, at the age of 15, in Nanagawa’s 1997 London production of this show. Given the language barrier and the more histrionic acting style of the Japanese stage as compared to Western theater, I can’t really comment on his performance. But I will dutifully report that Timberlake-level squeals filled the KenCen Opera House when Fujiwara took his curtain call.

 By Chris Klimek.

Shintoku-Maru is at the Kennedy Center for three more performances only, tonight and tomorrow. Tickets are $15-$35 and can be purchased here. Get there as early as you can; the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture festival has lots of other amazing things to see.

Source: Dcist.com

Our Picks

SHINTOKU-MARU [ON STAGE] The Kennedy Center’s two-week celebration of Japanese arts, “Japan! Culture + Hyperculture,” has many noteworthy events, but if you’re going to experience just one, consider the American debut of award-winning director Yukio Ninagawa’s tragic love and revenge fable. This play, based on an ancient tale, features Tatsuya Fujiwara as a young man haunted by the memory of his dead mother yet drawn to his new stepmother. The performance is presented in Japanese without subtitles, but a detailed synopsis is in the program. A taped audio synopsis read by Alan Rickman will be played after everyone is seated.

Thursday-Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Kennedy Center Opera House, 2700 F St. NW. $15-$35. 202-467-4600 or 800-444-1324.

Source: Washingtonpost.com

The Rising Sun Comes Up Early

The Kennedy Center, which has in past years saluted Japan during flowering fruit-tree season, is readying a smorgasbord of the country’s culture. Notable within next month’s “Japan! Culture and Hyperculture” are the many stylistic alloys, fusing Eastern and Western; the traditional and the avant-garde; the artistic and the technological.

Alicia Adams, the Kennedy Center’s vice president for international programming, speaks of Japan as a locus of aesthetic “collision.” Kenji Matsumoto, who consulted on the festival from his post at the New York branch of the Japan Foundation, agrees. “Japanese culture is very hybrid,” he says, adding that, indeed, these days “there is no such thing as essentially Japanese culture — or essentially American culture — because we are living in an interconnected world.”

The festival, Feb. 5 to 17, will showcase 467 artists and a number of robots, and sample — among other fare — anime, 8-bit pop music, taiko drumming, top-spinning, manga, Mikimoto pearls, a kyogen “Comedy of Errors” and, yes, Midori.

Lending the proceedings an intermittently sci-fi feel will be the robots, who should feel at home in this showbiz venue. Tracing the lineage of such automatons back to the clockwork manikins of the Edo period, Tokyo-based scholar Timothy N. Hornyak, who served as the festival’s robotics adviser, says, “Robots have been, essentially, performing artists in Japan for centuries.”

Movie star Tatsuya Fujiwara adds extra glamour to a visually haunting production by Yukio Ninagawa, a director famed for his takes on Shakespeare. Experimental writer Shuji Terayama’s reworking of a noh play (a dance-drama genre), “Shintoku-Maru” broods on loss, lust and vengeance. Feb. 7-9 at 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 9 at 1:30 p.m. Opera House. Performed in Japanese. Tickets start at $15.

Source: Washingtonpost.com