In my first article, Kabuki in NYC, I wrote a brief, general history of Kabuki followed by interview excerpts with Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII from an article in the Summer 2007 issue of the Kateigaho International Edition magazine. It also mentioned performance dates in NYC by Nakamura-sama’s troupe.
In this follow-up, I’ll be using a Washington Post article (which was part review of the NYC performances and part interview with Nakamura-sama and his sons). The article begins with a description from the Avery Fisher Hall performance of a portion of the play Hokaibo:
“And taking the stage at the Lincoln Center to play a shyster lecher of a monk, Nakamura Kanzaburo, 18th in a line of Kabuki masters, stands as the very symbol of Kabuki theater’s 400 years of tradition.Then he opens those lips.
‘He’s a metrosexual!’ he says suddenly in an aside onstage.
‘He only has a limited high school education,’ he says of a play’s character.
‘Who writes this crap?’ he asks in his minimal English.
Kanzaburo, it seems, has gone 21st century on Kabuki.
‘We want to create new ways of Kabuki,’ he says in Japanese through a translator while sitting in a midtown Manhattan restaurant, his soft-featured and smooth-shaven countenance well suited for his art’s facial demands. Then, he adds, eyebrows raised: ‘But it has to be successful.’
In 2000, he created his company, Heisei Nakamura-za to try to recapture the feel of the earliest years of Kabuki. Back in Edo-period Japan beginning about 1603, the art form was new and raw and raucous — and so weird that its very name meant ’tilted.’
Kanzaburo and his director, Kushida Kazuyoshi, infuse the classics with contemporary details to re-create that edginess of centuries ago. By doing so, they hope to appeal to the generation of Japan’s vid-kids reared on Hollywood films and anime.
The tradition of Kabuki is innovation, Kanzaburo likes to say. But the other tradition of that early, populist Kabuki is scorn from upper-caste tastemakers. Kanzaburo, 52, has faced such criticism.”
And that is the line which Nakamura-sama walks…acknowledging and upholding the tradition of Kabuki while trying to incorporate new ideas into the productions. In addition to English dialog for the US tour, he has used electric guitar and female singers in recent productions of the Heisei Nakamura-za in Japan, which his wife (who also comes from a family of Kabuki actors) had expressed some concerns:
“‘My wife’s family is very traditional — whenever I do something new, she says, ‘Is it a little too much?’ Like electric guitar — ‘Is it too much?’ Each time, we do a little more,’ he said.”
In the Kateigaho International interview, he commented that he always recognizes his responsibilities to the past:
“There is a corner in the third-floor lobby [of the Kabuki-za] where the photos of generations of great actors are exhibited. When I staged the new kabuki productions with Hideki Noda [theater director & playwright], I pressed my palms together before my chest and bowed to those photos. I prayed to them, saying that I was not trying to destroy or change their kabuki. As the Kabuki-za is a sacred hall of kabuki traditions, I make it a habit to report to my forebears whenever I try out new things. If they were around, though, I imagine they would understand our passion for innovation.”
While Hokaibo was an example of Nakamura-sama’s willingness to experiment and innovate, the troupe’s other New York performance, Renjishi, was an example of traditional Kabuki (no experimenting). The play’s story is a parable about a lion and his cubs. The lion throws the cubs off of a cliff and will rear them only if they can climb back up…proving they are strong enough to survive. Naturally, the cubs are played by Nakamura-sama’s own sons, Kantaro (25) and Shichinosuke (24).
Renjishi: left to right - Nakamura Shichinosuke, Nakamura Kanzaburo, Nakamura Kantaro
His sons have inherited his desire to innovate. They have their own ideas about creating new plays for Kabuki:
“‘Night of the Living Dead,’ suggests a smiling Kantaro, who is also a popular television and film actor in Japan. ‘Zombie.’
‘I can make those kinds of films into Kabuki,’ Kantaro says. ‘I want to do it from midnight till the first train starts running in the early morning. I’d have blood spurt on the audience. I’d call it ‘Midnight Kabuki.’ ‘
‘Comics,’ adds Shichinosuke — who appeared in the film The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise — suggesting absurd and gruesome manga stories about cannibals who gain special powers when they consume human flesh.
‘Kabuki is already violent, very dark,’ Kantaro says. ‘There’s no light in the Edo period, no electricity, night is very dark, there’s only moonlight — and on nights without moonlight, there’s only stars and lots of spirits.’
Will their father accept these ideas as legitimate Kabuki?
‘I haven’t talked to my father about it,’ he says, raising his index finger to his lips. ‘Shhh. It’s a secret.’”
Nakamura-sama himself toyed with the idea of creating new Kabuki, but he says:
“…life these days has become too easy to make good Kabuki.
‘You can fly [for] hours and get to New York,’ he says. ‘In the past, you would have to really journey, walk, ride, take a boat — even getting together for a simple meeting was full of confusion and complexity.
‘If they had had cellphones, Romeo and Juliet would not have had to die. He would have called her, and said: ‘Don’t take the medicine! I’m going to take a potion that’ll make me only look dead!’ “
And about his sons and their vision of Kabuki:
“‘I try to teach them exactly as I was taught,’ says Kanzaburo. ‘I don’t like distorting. But it’s like the telephone game — the same things always have to come out differently.’”
The Washington Post Article/Review:
Tradition With A Wry Twist
Hokaibo Photos: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Renjishi Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
