STAGE REVIEW : East West Players Offer Premiere of ‘Mishima’

The East West Players has unveiled the world premiere of “Mishima,” a collage of the life of famed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, whose ceremonial suicide in 1970 shocked an international following.

Long overdue as a theater piece (and veering in personal detail from Paul Schrader’s stylized 1985 film of the same title), the production stars EWP artistic director Mako in the treacherous title role. The production is a serpentine work, stylistically adventurous and alternately fable-like.

In the play’s first words, Mishima projects himself as “a prince who died while he was still young and beautiful.” At the end, Mishima’s prince is “a delicious atrocity.”

Boston-based playwright Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro tempers Mishima’s excesses with a Western kind of charm, and the result leavens Mishima’s indulgences--his voyeurism, his candid homosexuality, his unrelenting fantasies of violence and death.

(The playwright once spent a week with Mishima when he was 32 and visited her Japanese father in Michigan. Her interpretive license with Mishima’s character, she told The Times, was based on that experience.)

Mako, who experienced some raspy vocal problems at Thursday’s opening, controls, conquers and humanizes a role forged by burnished obsessions. Dominant among these is Mishima’s belief in traditional codes of samurai glory, living beautifully and dying horribly, “of soaring and then plunging to death. . . . I want to smell my own death . . . offer my life to Imperial Japan.”

At the end, at the age of 45, next to a bound-and-gagged army general, he does just that. His kneeling ceremonial suicide is assisted by a favored young aide, apparently as part of a private love pact. The aide is quietly, intelligently performed by Shaun Simoda.

(The suicide was an event that continues to embarrass Japan. At the time, even Japan’s right wing disowned Mishima.)

In the hara-kiri scene, director Shizuko Hoshi combines obvious visceral suspense with an affecting, unexpected sense of loss. The moment, in fact, echoes the loss at the end of “Equus,” when we know the boy needs a lobotomy but we’d rather see him running free in the fields of Pegasus.

Mako never allows Mishima to appear merely mad. And his portrait of Mishima’s voyeurism, gauzily dramatized behind screens, is off-handed and absent of guilt. So are moments of near-naked cadres of muscular youths catching Mishima’s eye.

Psychological underpinnings enlighten character. For instance, flashbacks target Mishima’s repressed childhood with his doting mother and macho father (solid turns by Emily Kuroda and Keone Young). Additionally telling is the young Mishima’s enforced 12-year encampment in a smelly room with his devilish, demanding grandmother (Merv Maruyama, who also wondrously doubles as a traditional, kimono-clad dancer).

In a gracious and touching performance, Sala Iwamatsu enacts Mishima as a young and deferential boy and then, in a startling about-turn, she later grinds it out as a sexy dancer in a nightclub. Her real-life sister, Mimosa, portrays Mishima’s obligatory wife in brief concluding scenes.

Classical and contemporary styles earmark the costumes and choreography, and a kendo warrior training session illuminates Mishima’s beautifully absurd feudal dreams. No wonder Mishima willed his demise. Mishima and modern-day Japan weren’t meant to last.

As he insists at the end, “The artist puts his entire being into a work of art and then perishes.”

Performances at 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays 2 p.m., special Saturday matinees April 23 and 30, 2 p.m., through May 15. Tickets: $10-$12. (213) 660-0036.