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| Robert Symonds, Andy Robinson. |
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| Cleavon Little. |
Britain’s Edward Bond, a controversial anti-Establishment
political playwright, provided the Lincoln Center Repertory Company with one of
its few modern plays in Narrow Road to
the Deep North, a work previously staged elsewhere in the United States but
not in New York. Written in the amazingly brief time of two and a half days, it
is a political parable told in Brechtian epic style, set in a fabled Japan
anywhere from the 17th through the 19th centuries, and based on a story by the
famed haiku poet Basho (Robert Symonds), taking its title from Basho’s classic
travel diary in prose and verse, Oku no
Hosomichi (1702).
Bond’s story so offended the playwright in its picture of an
artist whose personal search for truth cut him off from participation in the
suffering of others that he was compelled to write this savagely satirical
play.
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| Richard Greene, Robert Phalen, Martha Henry. |
The complex plot is essentially about Basho’s journey to the
north (the oku or “interior”) to seek
enlightenment. On his way he fails to save the life of an abandoned baby, one
that later grows up to become the tyrannical dictator of Japan, Shogo (Cleavon
Little). Shogo is forced to confront a rival for his power, the specter of
British colonialism and Christianity, represented by a British commodore
(Sydney Walker) and his Salvation Army sister (Martha Henry). The forces of the
latter pair predominate.
Crammed with deliberate anachronisms, allegorical symbols,
epigrams, brief scenes, and theatricalist conventions, as well as calculated
divergences from historical accuracy, Narrow
Road was an obvious example of Brecht’s potent influence on Bond. There was
considerable division concerning both the play and the production, which had a
much warmer response in its London original. On the other hand, its striking moments
of violence got it into hot water with the censors.
Brendan Gill assailed Bond’s “sophomoric/soporific” and too
familiar postulates: “military dictatorship is evil, imperialism is evil,
experience teaches nothing except that it teaches nothing.” But Harold Clurman
did not believe the work was “to be lightly dismissed.” Douglas Watt found it
simplistic, Martin Gottfried “simple-minded,” and Richard Watts a play “trapped
in its own hollow pretentiousness” as well as “fairy idiotic.”
Clive Barnes termed the production “distressingly tedious”
despite its “fresh ideas.” He railed at the misconceived direction and
performances. Walter Kerr concurred, calling it “a thin, confused, extremely
tardy venture into schoolboy symbolism,” burdened by an excruciatingly poor production,
with a cast of “dependable amateurs.” Yet Watt thought it “tidily” staged, and
Gill even believed the mounting to be “brilliant.”
Black actors played several of the Japanese roles, a feature
that distressed New York’s Asian-American actors, who later picketed Lincoln
Center to protest the kind of discriminatory casting practices that would
eventually lead to the end of most yellowface performances. In the ensuing
arbitration with Actors Equity, Lincoln Center Artistic Director Jules Irving’s
company was found guilty as charged.