STAGE REVIEW : POWER AND ELEGANCE IN SUZUKI’S ‘CLYTEMNESTRA’

While Los Angeles had a visit from Chicago’s Squat Theatre last week, La Jolla had one from the Suzuki Company of Toga, Japan.

The two are not alike, yet both deliver a theater for the senses--of strong, unexpected aural and visual images, whose meaning, when it can be found, is communicated not by logic or speech but by cumulative impression. It is theater that just is.

Not that there was no meaning in the Suzuki “Clytemnestra” (performed Thursday and Friday at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts on the UC San Diego campus), but that meaning took second place. The show required explanation less because it was spoken mostly in Japanese than because its message, in any language, would not be readily accessible. It is designed for absorption through metaphysical pores.

Anyone who remembers Suzuki’s “The Trojan Women” at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, with its structured marching and the vocal pyrotechnics of premiere actrice Kayoko Shiraishi, knows to expect nothing traditional from this company. Director Tadashi Suzuki capitalizes on the way in which the intransigence and inexorability of Greek tragedy marries well into the intransigent formality of ancient Japanese custom. And his “Clytemnestra” is no exception.

The elements of the story remain familiar: The philandering Agamemnon, returned victorious from the Trojan War, is welcomed by his wife Clytemnestra, then murdered by her and her lover, Egisthius.

Crazed by this action, Orestes and Electra, offspring of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, in turn kill their mother and her lover. Claiming the matricide to be the will of the god Apollo does not spare them from a decline into madness.

In a program note, Suzuki writes that he has used the fall of the House of Atreus to illuminate a condition of our time: “By examining the disintegration of the family, considered the fundamental constituent of society . . . I have intended to present an internal view of contemporary man, who is becoming more and more isolated because he cannot help but live in a spiritually chaotic state.”

Ah, but how beautifully he has done it. A director’s notes are usually signs of trouble ahead. In Suzuki’s case, they clarify what we would have been content to accept at face value--for its sheer power, sonority and dramatic elegance, as close to dance and music as theater dares to come.

This “Clytemnestra” takes place in Orestes’ mind. To differentiate between him and the specters of his tortured imagination, this Orestes speaks English--the only character to do so. Dressed in rags, he is also played by the only American in the company, Thomas Hewitt.

For the others, Suzuki uses the costumed pomp and gilt imagery of the Noh and Kabuki traditions, isolating individuals in singular pools of light. This reinforces the message of alienation, while the surrounding darkness suggests the limitlessness of Orestes’ despair.

Gods sit on raised thrones, citizens (in modern hats) sit in low chairs, flanked by the Furies and by waste baskets bearing the Marlboro cigarette logo (a concrete manifestation of modern-day nervousness?). Enveloping the nightmare vision is Suzuki’s sound track--score is not an adequate word--part modern music, part traditional Japanese clappers, part sheer noise, but chilling on all counts. It is a major component of the piece.

We witness Orestes’ struggle for dominance with Apollo (the spoken English helps). In a graphic and disturbing scene, we watch the crazed Electra (Hiroko Takahashi), in her own vestigial rags, drag in Egisthius’ corpse (a puppet) and perform on it a ritual reenactment of murder and castration. That may be “Clytemnestra’s” most powerful moment.

Its most vivid is the reenactment of the matricide. The ghost of Clytemnestra enters carrying the puppet bodies of Cassandra and Agamemnon. (She is played in white face by the remarkable Shiraishi whose features are so classically Japanese that they resemble a finely carved animated mask more than a face.)

A quasi-choreographed scene of self-justification and rebuke ends with Orestes brutally stabbing his mother again and again, in a startling reminder of the closeness of the frenzy of sex and the frenzy of violence. Carrying this subliminal image through, the piece ends in a suggestion of incest between Orestes and Electra, as Clytemnestra’s ghost, in a single gesture, pierces both through the heart.

There is an element of exploit in all this (theater is always exploit), but of a more religious than outrageous order. The sounds and visions in this hour and 10 minutes are potent, its special effects (such as the puppet corpses) much stronger than any attempt at realism could have been and the carefully structured, ritual aspect of its staging pure tonic. When theater can do that, it has done everything.

The company is on its way to the Chicago International Festival and the Theatre Des Nations in Baltimore in June.

‘CLYTEMNESTRA’ The Suzuki Company of Toga, Japan, in a piece based on the Greek tragedies and presented at the Mandell Weiss Performing Arts Center as part of the Pacific Ring Festival. Japanese text Shigeichi Kure, Michitaro Tanaka, Nisuke Matsumoto. English text Philip Vellacott, Emily Townsend Vermeule. Composer/director Tadashi Suzuki. Scenic and costume design Tadashi Suzuki. Additional costume design Yoko Ebata. Lighting Hideo Yoshihama, Michio Sakakibara. Sound Yasushi Kimura. Stage manager Masumi Sakai. Cast Kayoko Shiraishi, Thomas Hewitt, Hiroko Takahashi, Haruo Takayama, Kosuke Tsutamori, Takahisa Nishikibe and others.