STAGE REVIEW : A Pared-Down Grand Kabuki

Just as the great 19th-Century actor-managers barnstormed across America presenting adaptations of Shakespeare--with their brothers or wives cast in secondary roles--so Grand Kabuki master Senjaku Nakamura II and his son Tomotaro are now acting a cut-down rewrite of an 18th-Century classic by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (the Shakespeare of Japan) at the Japan America Theatre, the latest stop on a tour of Canada, Mexico and the United States. It’s here through Sunday.

From the small size of the company through the single, full-evening vehicle it performs (and the ignoble predicament of the characters played by father and son), this tour deliberately presents Grand Kabuki at its least grand. No feudal heroics. No superhuman transformations. No decorative dance divertissements and only a little comedy, most of it bitter.

But this, emphatically, is the real thing: The reduced scale and tight focus of the experience emphasize facets of Kabuki artistry that have been both overshadowed and undervalued on previous foreign tours. Suddenly the permutation of facial expressions and the intricacies of gesture have become the heart of the matter and, as we decode them, we enter another world.

In prologue and two acts, “A Messenger of Love in Yamato” (seen at the opening, Wednesday night), contrasts urban and rural values as it explores conflicts between love and duty. A young money courier loves a courtesan but they can’t be together because he hasn’t got the cash. A farmer loves his errant son, but they, too, are separated because of the law. What should be can’t be in this play except through elaborate, dangerous pretenses--and each act hinges on one.

In the prologue, flickers of emotion transform Senjaku’s face as he depicts the courier’s foolish vacillation. Soon these flickers expand to lightning bolts as the pathetic young man bluffs about a rich inheritance and produces a client’s money as proof.

Tension around his mouth and eyes violently releases into an almost drunken bravado as he risks everything and loses. It’s as if his body can’t support the realization of what’s he’s doing and buckles under him--just as later the courtesan (Tomotaro) repeatedly collapses after she learns the truth.

These are spectacular displays of meticulously controlled stylized movement: indicative gesture enlarged into whole-body statements. In Act II, where the doomed lovers visit the courier’s father, this form of heightened physical expression briefly becomes full-fledged dance, but it is a dance of recollection based in pantomime. These lovers can’t transcend their fates even in fantasy: When they dance, we see images of them trudging through snow and spending the last of their money.

Providing the conflict with the courier and courtesan is a boorish merchant (Act I) and the wily father (Act II), both strongly played by Gato Kataoka V in a comparatively realistic style, though, in the latter role, he too must literally crumple in despair as events overwhelm him.

Tragic stature or even tragic insight is not possible for these people: The best they can do is to lament that their dream is over. But the remarkable transparency of Senjaku’s performance brings their problems very close to us. Even if we retreat from the sentimental finale (agonized farewells in the snow), we’ve come to a level of understanding impossible with most of the exotic and remote repertory of previous Grand Kabuki tours.

No doubt the dancing lions and monstrous spiders will soon visit us again; in the meantime, however, we have a poor country boy who wants something that he just can’t afford. And, as long as Senjaku plays him, that’s something to see.