STAGE REVIEW : An American’s Sequel to a Japanese Drama

We are in a village in 12th century Japan. Tsutsumi is a young girl who will not conform. She has a passion for insects--the more grotesque the better.

Her distraught mother brings in a medium to conduct an exorcism. The daughter then makes an agreement with her mother that for the next 1,000 days she will live in a hole under the house, communicating through ringing bells.

If she endures and should she die precisely on the 1,000th day, she will be mummified and consecrated as a Buddha. When the 1,000th day arrives, the mother’s anxiety has turned from horror to temptation: imagine being the mother of a Buddah?

“When the Woman Who Loved Insects Hid” is an exotic piece of original theater from Japan which launched its American tour with a two-night run at the Matrix Theater, concluded Tuesday. The production (performing in Washington D.C. and New York later this month) demonstrates the power of the folk tale to create wonder if the texture is sufficiently rich.

In this case, that texture is enriched by two on-stage musicians playing original compositions on traditional Japanese instruments. In addition, elements of puppet and of Noh theater mix with a fluid, non-traditional acting style that is more Open Theater than medieval Japanese.

What is notable is that the play is not a Japanese invention but that of an American playwright/actress/expatriate from Wisconsin, Patty Christiena Willis. She moved to Japan four years ago to study medieval Japanese literature and found her play’s source material in a 12th century Japanese story (“The Woman Who Loved Insects”), which abruptly concluded with the words “To be continued.”

It never was and Willis, schooled for the task, dreamed up the sequel, which has all the historical authenticity of an 800-year old Japanese myth. That includes the ancient Japanese practice of exorcism and the 1,000-day purification process for mummified Buddhahood that are well known in Japan. Willis premiered the show last summer at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh before staging it in Japanese cities for her Omicho Theater Company, a theater collective of American and Japanese women based in the old castle town of Kanazawa.

Willis performs the triple roles of the daughter, medium, and mother, recounting the girl’s story in flashbacks seen from the mother’s point of view. Enfolded in a great, garish robe and spending considerable time in swirling contortions from the floor of the stage, her performance is an Oriental danse macabre .

Her composer (fellow expatriate Californian Mary Lou Prince) informs the play’s passage between reality and spirit by playing a koto (a traditional Japanese harp) and inventively adapting it to percussion purposes. The second musician, Wazan (Ronni) Alexander, also Japanese-trained, creates trance-like moods on a shakuhachi (bamboo flute).

Willis directs herself but would benefit from another director forcing her to make sharper distinctions among her three characters. The experience is not alien, but not always as accessible as it could be. No Japanese had either the nerve or the imagination to tamper with one of their revered tales. It took somebody from Wisconsin.