STAGE REVIEW : ‘DREAM OF KITAMURA’--AN EYE FOR THE VISUAL

If ever a company lived up to its name, the Theatre of the Open Eye is it. Its perspective on Philip Kan Gotanda’s “The Dream of Kitamura” is life as a tea ceremony, rudely interrupted by life’s intrigues and violence. (The production itself had a rudely brief engagement at the Japan America Theatre: It opened last Thursday and closed the next night.)

The company’s co-founder, Jean Erdman, has directed with such a Japanese sense of space and rhythm that she seems to have received a direct transfusion of that culture’s aesthetics.

The directorial eye here is not only open, but aware that theatergoers’ eyes are usually starved for meaningful imagery. Erdman may or may not have intended it, but her staging is a direct challenge to the assumption that the theater can’t compete with the cinema’s visual capacity.

She uses the Japan America stage as a frame for Cinemascope-type pictures. She sweeps those pictures clean of clutter, producing the sensation of epic intimacy--just the tone of Gotanda’s text. She choreographs in large, horizontal sweeps, while letting our eyes move vertically as well. (Victor En Yu Tan’s lights assist immensely.) She employs the acoustic/electronic music of the duo, Origin, as a rich sound track, highly reminiscent of the Toru Takemitsu scores for Akira Kurosawa’s great movies.

She also has a very interesting play to work with, and it’s more than structurally Shakespearean. Echoing “Macbeth’s” theme of murder as an infinitely resounding act, “Kitamura’s” murder haunts, not the perpetrator, but the innocent but menacing feudal lord Rosanjin (William Akamine Ha’o).

His dream of the terrifying demon Kitamura (Ralph Lee’s masks and Eiko Yamaguchi costumes add great terror) is so real that his guards (Stanford Egi and Glenn Kubota) are sent out on patrol. But they’re club-footed soldiers.

Gotanda has linked Noh and Kabuki narrative traditions (elaborate rites and narration) to Freudian thought, as Egi’s Paolo falls in love with Rosanjin’s daughter (June Angela), thus threatening her mother’s (Jodi Long) well-disguised control of the household. Dream becomes a kind of weapon; it’s an ideal concept to propel visually oriented theater.