READING KABUKI’S SIGNALS

Kabuki is . . . strange. Which was the implication of Kabuki when the first performances were given in the 1600s: a series of perfumed kooch shows, after which male patrons were invited to dally with the girls (and later the boys). Even after the Kabuki theater went legitimate, it was considered a low sort of entertainment, and an emperor didn’t view a performance until the late 1800s.

Today, we associate Kabuki with everything that is gorgeous, distant and august in Japanese art. Perhaps we should spend less time respecting it and more time enjoying it. To that end, the first thing the visitor should do when he goes to see the Grand Kabuki at Royce Hall is to rent one of those little speaker-in-the-ear devices, over which Faubion Bowers supplies a running English translation of the action: a Kabuki-cast.

The listener learns that Kabuki texts aren’t as exalted as the acting style might suggest. They can be both earthy and funny. They even make use of “inside” jokes--quite bad ones. “Why are our faces painted red?” “Because that’s the custom in Kabuki.” Kabuki can be solemn, but it rarely suffers from earnestness.

The aim is to give the viewer a show, while incidentally telling him a story. Americans can relate to that. It’s the same principle that guides our Broadway musical. To the viewer from Mars, “Sweet Charity” would look just as exotic as Kabuki. We simply understand its cultural signals better.

But Kabuki looks so foreign . For instance, we have trouble connecting with its frank use of artifice--the codified movement, the exaggerated makeup, the gorgeous costumes, the sing-song voices, the hanamichi gangplank, the device of using men in women’s roles.

But think. The Greeks also presented all-male companies in larger-than-life productions. So did Shakespeare. And Kabuki stretches back in an unbroken link almost to Shakespeare’s time. Maybe it has something to teach us about the way our classics were written to be played. (Remember Ariane Mnouchkine’s Kabuki-inspired “Richard II” at the Olympic Arts Festival last summer?)

Maybe, too, Kabuki is suggesting that Western theater should give up trying to reproduce the littleness of life, which film does so much more convincingly, and should get back to devising images for the grand passions that make life so interesting.

Kabuki offers such an image in the mie --the glare that’s supposed to stop one’s adversary in his tracks. To Western eyes this may seem a ludicrously contorted expression, childish almost. But it stands for a real impulse. The next time you’re furious with someone, notice the urge you feel to wither him with a look--a perfect mie .

Oddly, the minute that one gives up wishing that Kabuki were more realistic, the more true-to-life it begins to seem. An actor will offer a gesture as homely as the clapping of two sandals together to get off the dirt. Or Tamasaburo, the great onnagata , will literally seem to swell as his female character becomes possessed by a demon. Like any language, Kabuki is an abstraction. But each of its characters has an emotional component.

Westerners will never read its hieroglyphics as well as the Japanese, but each time the Grand Kabuki comes to the United States we learn something new about the form. The interest in the current tour is to see how many different kinds of plays fall under the overall rubric of Kabuki.

The Royce Hall program opens with the new Danjuro XII playing opposite his uncle, Shoroko II, in an aragoto showpiece called “Shibaraku.” The official translation is “Wait a Minute,” but “Hold It, Partner” might better convey its “High Noon” mentality.

Then comes a comic sketch called “The Sword Thief,” with Tatsunosuke playing a wily wretch with 5 o’clock shadow and Yasosuke playing a country rube whom he fleeces out of his sword. The joke here is the way the two actors mirror each other’s movements. It was funny when Plautus did it in “The Twin Menechmi”; it’s still funny.

The third piece is a cut-down version of Danjuro’s inauguration ceremony last spring as Danjuro XII. The New York critics complained that it was boring, so it has turned into an equally formulaic recitation of how glad the players are to be performing in the United States. The number does convey the spirit of freemasonry that makes a Kabuki company so different from the average ad hoc American cast.

Finally, “Kasane,” a Gothic romance (complete with skull) for Tamasaburo and Takao. Tamasaburo, especially, conveys the porcelain patience of a bunraku puppet. Kabuki is a theater of many moods; this program provides an excellent sample of its range.