THEATER REVIEW : A Non-Linear ‘night’ Fuses Poetry, Jazz

Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda collaborates with musician Dan Kuramoto to create “in the dominion of night,” a perfect marriage of poetic, oblique narrative with driving contemporary music.

Gotanda plays the protagonist Joe Ozu, whose stream-of-consciousness musings are underscored by the integral original music of Kuramoto and his fellow musicians, billed here as Mr. Moto and the New Orientals. Kuramoto is a founding member of the jazz-fusion band Hiroshima. (Call this fusion theater.) In addition to Kuramoto on horns, the group features Danny Yamamoto, also of Hiroshima, on drums, and Taiji Miyagawa on upright bass. Diane Emiko Takei directed the production, which closes a limited run tonight at East West Players.

Tuesday evening’s ambience was reminiscent of a smoke-filled, 1950s coffeehouse where tortured artists bared their poetic souls between beats on the bongo drums. The difference, evident from the outset, was the sense of playful self-parody.

More puckish than intellectually pretentious, Gotanda has the timing of a stand-up comic and the ability to play off the reactions of his audience. He disarms us with laughter, then disturbs us with his imagery--a nameless beast with “sawed-off fingers,” an abandoned newborn floating face-down in a pool of water.

The play--or more appropriately, the set--opens with Ozu waking into what F. Scott Fitzgerald termed “the real dark night of the soul.” Ozu cannot decide whether he is asleep or awake, or indeed whether he exists, or whether the world exists. After pondering his position in this inverted universe, where “everything that seems is really not,” Ozu hits the streets in search of adventure, pausing at a run-down bar for a drink.

Considering the increasing surrealism of Ozu’s subsequent exposition, one suspects that the bartender must have slipped a hit of LSD into his double cognac. The urban landscape of Ozu’s imaginings ripples and shifts enough to break the needle on anyone’s psychic Richter scale. But Ozu is too mad, or too inspired, or too just plain drunk, to heed warning signs. Blundering into tragedy, Ozu finds himself apotheosized, “consumed in a perfect immolation of rapture and nothingness.”

Those who like their entertainment linear might be put off by this production. But those who still spark to the rhythms of Kerouac or Ginsberg--or great jazz, for that matter--might find this is their “night.” Russell Leong opens the evening with readings from his book of collected poems “The Country of Dreams and Dust.”

* “in the dominion of night,” East West Players, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. Tonight only. $8. (213) 660-0366. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.