DANCE DRAMA : KITA NOH COMPANY AT JAPAN AMERICA THEATRE

At a time when American popular culture proclaims that we can have it all--that our only problem is mastering the possibilities--how dare the Kita Noh Theater of Japan bring us 600- year-old lessons in human transience?

Who needs to be shown that the attachments of this world are a trap when it’s obvious that we’re going to live forever--eternally affluent, fit, fashionable and smelling not too far from innocence?

Over and over, through a long and varied program Monday at the Japan America Theatre, the distinguished Kita Noh and Nomura Kyogen companies kept making the very notion of desire--for things, for recognition, even for love--seem all but pathological. In stately masked dance-drama and irrepressible physical comedy, the cautions against pride, sensuality and greed remained relentlessly acute.

The second half of the drama “Tadanori,” for example, showed the spirit of a dead warrior walking the earth like Hamlet’s father’s ghost--but for what? Merely a byline: A poem of his was included in a famous anthology but, because he belonged to a vanquished political faction, his name was omitted.

Can those of us who write for a living not blush at that, to fail to consider self-importance as self-delusion when Tadanori pleads for literary fame so restlessly from beyond the grave?

In performance, Noh practices the forbearance it preaches. On a bare stage marked by wooden columns (with a long entrance-corridor at the left), the dramas

unfold as austere rituals. Since such plays as “Aoi no Ue” (performed complete on Monday) illustrate how passion makes people into monsters, their emotion is distilled in formal tableaux of superbly controlled intensity, accompanied by deeply resonant chanting/singing and the sharp accents of drums and flute.

Weight is a key concept. In their stiff, formal kimonos, the performers (all of them male) make low, wide shapes akin to the pine tree painted on the back wall of the stage. Even walking steps (with heels slowly pressing into the floor at each footfall) convey the sense of carrying an unbearable burden.

The leading character in each play is masked: an archetype, eternally fixed in his role and his folly. But when (in “Tadanori”) actor Muneo Sasaki mournfully flings one sleeve up or displays an arrow with Tadanori’s poem attached to it, he creates an uncanny sense of the mask changing expression.

Similarly, when Sadayo Kita prowls the stage at the end of “Aoi no Ue” as the jealous, vengeful apparition of Lady Rokujo--a disembodied specter of hate belonging to a woman not yet dead--raising his hammer-headed staff to threaten the Buddhist priest attempting to exorcise him, the fearsome glare of his horned demon-mask seems to soften in an overwhelming wave of sound: choral singing, instrumental voices, the rasping of prayer beads, the priest’s chant.

Rokujo capitulates, and so do we: The intensity of Noh comes from a vision of spiritual power that is unmistakable, and awesome, whether we believe in it or not.

It is a power not shared by the earthy Kyogen--though the two-character “Yasematsu” sketch (the Nomura company’s sole contribution Monday) does offer the same exposure of false values in a broad comic context. And it is a power diluted or even distorted by the more familiar Kabuki adaptations of Noh plays, made for a worldly, acquisitive society very much like our own.

More than any form of theater anywhere, Noh holds to an ideal of transcendence--for its obsessed characters and also, in the climactic, engulfing layering of literary, religious, dramatic and musical forms at the end of a play, for its audience. Thus, despite its studied, stylized, symbolic artifices, this is no exotic historical curio. To the contrary: In its parables of devotion to the ephemeral, Noh reflects how we define ourselves, suggesting a condition of clarity and balance that few of us will ever attain.