STAGE REVIEW : SAKAMOTO’S ‘FOREST’ A TAPESTRY

In “Chikamatsu’s Forest,” playwright Edward Sakamoto and the East West Players have spun a tapestry incorporating Kabuki theater and colloquial speech. The result is not only the most accessible Kabuki you may ever see but an experience that seldom violates the grace and bold style associated with classical Japanese theater.

Both aurally and visually, “Chikamatsu’s Forest” is a dreamscape, a coppery fairy tale filled with characters who are not what they seem, playing out a forest adventure that is alternatingly elegiac and starkly robust. Sakamoto’s brush strokes with humor might ruffle the elitists, but the production is so rooted in the choreography, music and climactic moments of Kabuki and Bunraku (or puppet theater) that you applaud this high-wire act joining tradition and contemporary idiom.

The title character and his announced disdain for writing plays for egotistical Kabuki actors is based on the real-life Kabuki-turned-Bunraku artist Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), considered by many to be Japan’s Shakespeare. The role is wonderfully, even tenderly, created by Glen Chin. Literary characters are always difficult to dramatize, but Sakamoto seems to have found a personal alter ego and poured his own soul into this droll, observant character.

Director Shizuko Hoshi draws vital portrayals from Dana Lee as a quietly intense samurai down on his luck; Francois Chau as a snarling but dim-headed mercenary; and a remarkably deft, almost doll-like figurine of a courtesan is played with mesmerizing and deceptive fragility by the drama’s only actress, Mimosa Iwamatsu. Her costume and wig design (by Terrence Tam Soon and Claude Diaz, respectively) and her startling albino-white facial makeup are emblematic of the show’s irresistible physical texture.

That texture, from Mako’s spare, mood-inducing set design to Rae Creevey’s delicately shaded lighting, earmarks a show that, with the power of the Muse, draws you into its fantasy. The staccato clap of blocks of wood and other musical counterpoints from three off-stage musicians--and the black expanse of stage on which warriors and courtesan whirl in dance--enhance the alien and pantomimic flavor.

Everything is stylized except the speech, although even some of that (the least successful part) is formalized. The dangers of erudition are sidestepped, notwithstanding a samisen-accompanied Bunraku takeoff on the most popular Kabuki play ever, the 1748 “Chushingura.”

But by that time the production’s spell has cast its fold. It’s a warm tent, comforting and disorienting at the same time.

Performances at 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m., with matinees Oct. 26 and Nov. 2, 2 p.m., through Nov. 16, (213) 660-0366. (Production moves to Cal State Northridge, for one week, beginning Nov. 30.)