“#MeFirst”
By John
K. Gillespie (guest reviewer)
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| Noda Hideki, Glyn Pritchard, Lilo Baur. All photos: Terry Lin. |
Suddenly,
the father, Bo, a noh actor, played by Lilo Baur, a Swiss actress, wearing
standard noh costume, traverses the hashigakari slowly and deliberately (the noh
movement advisor is Tsumura Reijirō), and enters the stage. Initially, all three
actors attempt this sort of movement—not well, I might add, but perhaps that is
simply integral to the farce. Then the mother, Boo, Noda’s role, enters wearing
a flower-patterned kimono, her hair styled in outrageous 1940s glam, recalling
the long-popular Japanese comic strip Sazae-san (by Hasegawa
Machiko, running 1946 till 1974; also an animé), and immediately tangles with
Bo, her husband, over whether she ever listens to him.
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| Noda Hideki. |
Soon, daughter Pickles, played by Glyn Pritchard, a Welshman,
in a strange, space-travel outfit (all costumes by Hibino Kozue), appears,
adding fuel to the family fire. One can hardly ignore the gender bending—a female
plays the father, males play mother and daughter—engendering considerable humor
(the gentleman next to me laughed seemingly at every line) not to mention Noda
poking fun at the traditionally all male noh and kabuki.
At stake in the family squabble is who stays home that
evening to care for their pregnant dog, Princess. Bo claims his acting fame
gives him the right to attend a highly important engagement, Boo has a Boyz of
Noise concert she refuses to miss, and Pickles, denigrating Boyz of Noise as
“not even music,” declares that, over tapas, she and her high-tech friends are
going to develop important apps.
Asserting his (self) importance, Bo shouts to the two women,
“Let me man-splane!” Noda’s characteristic wordplay is evident, as when Bo
claims he must make his engagement, because of his “high standing,” to which
Boo, unwilling to lose out, retorts that she is “standing very patiently.” And
Pickles, digital-age child concerned about machines’ dominance, loudly asserts
that “we are all ones and zeros” and that she and her friends must develop apps
“to save the world.”
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| Glyn Pritchard. |
The ensuing knock-down-drag-out fight wreaks total havoc on
their home, well designed by Horio Yukio and lit by Christoph Wagner, with
nearly everything destroyed, including their cellphones, landline phone, and
the large television set embedded in the stage-rear wall. All brandish their inviolable
personal agendas, none giving an inch, insisting that someone else look after
pregnant Princess. In the melée, Boo retrieves Princess’s metal cuff with chain
and somehow manages to clamp it on Bo, but he finagles Boo into position to
chain her, and, before long, they shackle Pickles as well.
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| Noda Hideki, Glyn Pritchard, Lilo Baur. |
What are we to make of this sordid scene? The quick action
is vintage Noda. He emerged over 30 years ago with his troupe Yume no Yuminsha (Dream Wanderers), adapting tales from
manga (comics) and well-known stories, such as Tom Sawyer and Shakespeare’s
comedies. Performances featured multiple characters, cutesy and childlike,
tiered stages, cacophonic sound, ceaseless water-sprite movement, wordplay
(often using archaic words drawn from Japanese classical theatre to give his
performances a distinctly different feel) all appearing, beyond the immediate
fun, to go nowhere in particular; the performance was the thing. His plays sold
out, despite tickets being costly.
In 1992, he disbanded Dream Wanderers, went to London, improved
his English and broadened his theatrical horizons so that some plays were hardly
identifiable as Japanese. By 1993, he established NODA • MAP, a Japanese company with global reach. He often collaborates
with British playwright
Colin Teevan and actress Kathryn
Hunter. Noda’s work now is considerably more interesting conceptually
and structurally than before 1993 and provides rich roles for actors, often
non-Japanese. He has gained multiple awards and continues to be active as
playwright-director and versatile actor, becoming artistic director of Tokyo
Metropolitan Theatre in 2009.
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| Glyn Pritchard, Noda Hideki, Princess. |
His
accomplishment in this play is substantial, beginning with the Japanese title, Omote ni deroi! (表に出ろいっ!),
smacking of yakuza (gangster) argot,
meaning something like, “get the fuck outside (of the house) and we’ll settle
it there!” There would appear to be no obvious connection to the English, One Green Bottle, unless one knows the
ditty (as per one of several version): “Ten
green bottles, hanging on the wall. And if one green bottle should accidentally
fall, there’d be nine green bottles hanging on the wall.” Which continues till
there is only one bottle, then none left, recalling the American children’s
song, “Ten Little Indians.”
So, at the end of One Green Bottle, who’s left? As it happens, Bo, Boo, and Pickles
are all there at the end, singing the ditty. But the family dysfunction has taken
over and the destruction is complete. Bo intones: “We have imprisoned ourselves
in our own home.”
That sorry state of affairs provides telling
context for Pickles’s extended monologue when she articulates her existential
vision. She claims her family is not Bo and Boo but “a family of free thinking
individuals who . . . reject the ubiquitous toxicity of ridiculous societal
pressures to think of [me] as a person . . . actually alive . . . [to] embrace the near certain fact that we are
inside a computer program . . . about to suffer a catastrophic failure. . . .”
Boo thinks such doomsday musings are evidence that Pickles is in a cult, which, of course, she is, while Bo asks, “What makes you so sure the world is about to implode under the weight of its own absurdity?” This injects a meta-pattern into the play, since that’s exactly what has happened to his family, though Bo ironically fails to perceive it. Pickles reinforces this and gets to the heart of things, avowing to Bo and Boo that her cult members “understand me. They make me feel welcome [and] understood. I just want to be less lonely and you two don’t help with that. . . .”
Boo thinks such doomsday musings are evidence that Pickles is in a cult, which, of course, she is, while Bo asks, “What makes you so sure the world is about to implode under the weight of its own absurdity?” This injects a meta-pattern into the play, since that’s exactly what has happened to his family, though Bo ironically fails to perceive it. Pickles reinforces this and gets to the heart of things, avowing to Bo and Boo that her cult members “understand me. They make me feel welcome [and] understood. I just want to be less lonely and you two don’t help with that. . . .”
Pickles is onto something here. She admits to taking
medicine promoted by the cult: a truth pill. Truth may be the one aspect that
this family needs to grasp what has befallen them. But truth, like the family
and their home, has been destroyed. The only way left to them—to all of us,
this play suggests—is to take the right medicine. In this way, Noda lifts the
specific family issue before our eyes beyond the personal to a national level
and provides trenchant comment on the current me-first drift of Japanese
society with its demise of traditional, nuclear families, a complex demise
loaded with ingredients such as self-regard taken to extremes.
From there, it’s hardly a stretch for his play
to attain universal proportions. That might be easier to sense for Japanese,
given their traditionally oriented, monolingual, mono-ethnic culture and their
language where the word “individualism” (kojinshugi
個人主義) is
defined as “selfish” and “egocentric” in Japanese dictionaries. There is,
therefore, a starker contrast with Japanese tradition than with ours, though
the impact of this play is quite timely beyond Japan, what with the global rise
of populist nationalism and ubiquitous cries of “my country first.”
Although the play ends on a bleak note, there might be
a thin silver lining: within the detritus-filled cloud, Princess (a stuffed
dog) is brought on stage and delivers six puppies. Although she dies, she has
birthed new life, not human but new life nonetheless. In addition, Boo, having inadvertently
swallowed some of Pickles’ truth pills, pulls out a box hidden under the floor:
it’s a series of locked boxes within each other, to reveal a set of Russian matroschka dolls. From the smallest, she
digs out a tiny package and unwraps her apparently lost wedding ring. “I don’t
like wearing it,” she says, “I just like knowing it’s there.”
New-born puppies and a long unworn wedding ring are
not much to go on, but, with this dysfunctional family, it’s all there is.
LaMama Experimental Theatre Club
74A East 4th St., NYC
Through March 8
John K. Gillespie is
one of the West’s leading scholar-translators of modern Japanese drama. He’s
the co-editor, with Robert T. Rolf, of Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten
Plays (University of Hawaii Press, 1992).
