It’s Kabuki for Kids, but It’s Not Easy

It’s a challenging moment for both audiences and actors in “Wondrous Tales of Old Japan,” when a character’s grief-stricken wail at his father’s death is loudly echoed in exaggerated tones by the show’s onstage narrator.

At that point, in the elementary and middle school auditoriums where the show is playing, “there’s some laughter,” said writer and director David Furumoto.

“It’s not until the narrator’s second cry that they actually go, ‘OK, this is serious’--the narrator is picking up the emotion of the character onstage. That’s something that happens in Kabuki plays--the trading off of emotional states and a heightening of the emotion.”

“Wondrous Tales,” which features a score by taiko drum expert Kenny Endo, was originally commissioned by Peter Brosius, artistic director of the nation’s flagship youth theater, Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis for the 1998 season there.

Still, bringing this version, sumptuous but streamlined for the tour, to Southland students would seem a gutsy choice for the Mark Taper Forum’s PLAY company (Performing for Los Angeles Youth) and its producing director, Corey Madden. (Brosius is PLAY’s former artistic director.)

Abstract and symbolic, with highly exaggerated movement, growling exclamations, singsong vocalizations, percussive and plaintive music, bizarre, face-transforming makeup, and multilayered, elaborate costumes--Kabuki is not your average middle schooler’s entertainment du jour. Even most adult Westerners tend to view this ancient Japanese art form as too exotic for comfort.

Furumoto’s play is an adaptation of favorite Japanese folk tales from his childhood--a fisherman’s fantastic undersea odyssey; a woodcutter’s encounter with the demonic Snow Woman; a heroic ogre-fighter--but it isn’t strictly classic Kabuki. Not only is it in English, but women, not men, play women’s roles. Nor, noted Endo, has classical Kabuki been a youth theater medium in Japan.

But Endo, who spent four weeks rehearsing Bryan Yamami and Vivian Seki, two professional taiko musicians who alternate in the performances, praises the “tremendous integrity” of the show. His score, played on traditional Kabuki instruments, includes classic drumming patterns that represent soft falling snow, a snowstorm, ocean waves, a rushing river, exit and entrance themes and “the sound of being in the mountains.”

“Every effort has been made to give a true sense of what this theater form is,” he said.

“It’s been a wonderful blending of creative energies,” Furumoto said. “From the designers [Akeime Mitterlehner’s sets, Lydia Tanji’s costumes, Jose Lopez’s lights] to the music to being able to work with these wonderful actors.”

Work is the operative word. To prepare them for their roles, Furumoto put Karole Foreman, Yuria Kim, Ova Saopeng, Shaun Shimoda and Michael Tolfo through “Kabuki boot camp.”

“I had a very short time to teach people who had no idea what Kabuki theater was. That first week of rehearsals--six days a week, at least eight hours a day--we concentrated just on movement. We didn’t even look at the text.”

“We worked really hard; the director inspired us,” said Foreman, who plays Yuki Onna the Snow Woman in addition to the graceful Sea Princess and other roles.

Furumoto was inspired too. Foreman, a stranger to Kabuki when she auditioned, gave the director a new insight into the character of the Snow Woman, a role that he had cast with a male actor in the Minneapolis production.

“She gave me a sense of the anger in this spirit who had taken human form,” Furumoto said, “and, what I had not seen before, the pain of her turning back into this elemental spirit again, the dying of the human part of her.”

Foreman relishes the Snow Woman’s transformation onstage as “high diva drama,” but Furumoto also compliments her graceful performance as the Sea Princess in “Urashimataro,” about a fisherman’s double-edged reward for a good deed. Foreman, who must do a stately court dance while manipulating a fan, was initially “terrified” by the role’s formality.

Flowing Movements Are Part of the Role

“There’s intention behind every single thing you do, from a head movement to a hand gesture,” she said. “It was really nice to kind of fall into your own center and just enjoy the moment.”

Kim found that her background in hula, with its flowing arm and hand movements, helped in playing the mother in “Momotaro, the Peach Boy.” As the woman who finds a child in a giant peach that floats down a river (a rippling cloth), Kim must coax the peach to her with a song and subtle, coquettish gestures to create a mood that she describes as “sweet, gentle enticement.”

The audience gets its first exposure to the unusual stylized vocals from Saopeng, who performs most of the narration in the show (he also plays a squid warrior and a scarlet-haired, golden-clawed ogre). He begins the play with a drawn out, high-pitched word of welcome--”Yo . . . KO . . . so”--followed by a singsong “Mukashi, mukashi” (Long ago . . .). He was self-conscious at first, he said.

“It felt kind of weird. There’s usually laughter--’oh, he’s talking funny, that sounds strange.’ But I just kind of take that and push on and continue and get them used to listening to the musicality and the style of it.”

Stepping in as narrator in “The Snow Woman” is Shimoda, whose multiple roles include the fisherman Urashima, who elicits nervous laughter from the audience as he echoes a son’s grieving cry at losing his father to the cold-hearted Snow Woman.

Furumoto, who also teaches Asian theater at the University of Wisconsin, gave the actor this advice: “Don’t be afraid of being accused of being melodramatic. The more honest you can make that cry, the higher the payoff will be.”

“There’s a certain wonderful emotional quality that comes out when the person who’s reciting goes into this type of stylization,” Furumoto said. “One of the interesting things for me in writing the adaptation was having that style of delivery in mind--but how do you make the English work with it? Vocal technique in Kabuki is probably even harder to teach than the physical movement.”

“I told [the cast] in the long run, it’s the truth of you, the actor, bringing the emotions and the truth of the moment. I said, ‘Think of the Kabuki style as a gemstone that you’re shooting your acting energy through. If your truth and heart are in what you are doing, then the energy comes out like a laser beam and you will touch the audience, you will make them cry and make them laugh.’ ”

* “Wondrous Tales of Old Japan” will be performed for the general public at Colburn School, Zipper Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., L.A., on Saturday at 11 a.m., $6, (213) 202-2287; New Ivar Theatre, 1605 N. Ivar Ave., Hollywood, on March 17 at 1 p.m., free, (213) 972-7589 and (213) 972-7587; Asian Youth Center, 100 W. Clary Ave., San Gabriel, on March 24 at 3 and 5 p.m., free, (626) 309-0622, Ext. 101.