Image: Tokyo’s Santa Monica Boulevard (photo by Amanda L. Andrei)
Notebook from Tokyo: Reflecting on Our Theater from Overseas
What are the Spirits of American Theater?
By Amanda L. Andrei
My last day in Tokyo, waiting for Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba): Attack on the Swordsmith Village to open, a woman seated next to me pulled out a hand-sized figurine of Hantengu, a frail-looking yet vicious demon from the story. She propped it on the aisle railing and took its picture against the backdrop of the smoky stage. In that moment, I knew that this show was going to be good.
In fact, the show was the last part of a triptych of performances I saw while in Japan, starting with the realist comedy Monday’s Teachers (Getsuyōbi no kyōshi-tachi) by the collective Team Adabana and followed by the Kabuki play Sukeroku and the Black Hand Gang (Kurotegumi Kuruwa no Tatehiki) by Kawatake Mokuami. These three gave me a taste of a wide range of Tokyo-based theater — but still only skimmed the surface, whetting my appetite for more as I reflected not just on the craft of playwriting and styles of Japanese performance, but the spirit of American theater.
I love seeing theater in languages that are new to me. Both my playwright and critic brains shut down as they take a break from linguistic meaning. My theater kid mind sharpens in the presence of a foreign language, honing in on other theatrical vocabulary and detecting how tension can be created and understood beyond speech. When talent is present, it radiates beyond words.
Though I do not speak or readily understand Japanese, I come to the culture with curiosity, respect, and as a theater lover. Only the kabuki show had translations; I glanced between a handheld tablet and the stage. A Japanese-speaking plus one was unable to make the Team Adabana show, and I relied on my prior knowledge of the Demon Slayer manga and anime to enjoy the adaptation. And upon seeing the black box stage in the Suzunari theater for Monday’s Teachers, I felt a happy shiver of recognition. An entrance, an exit, a clear space of possibilities — this is where wonder can happen.
“Monday’s Teachers” by Team Adabana
While a comedy grounded in realism sounds like it would be the toughest to comprehend in another language, my experience of Monday’s Teachers showed me how gesture, breath, and strong stage images can create humor and drama despite a language barrier.
Six educators convene over a day or so within a teacher’s lounge that seems more storage area than gathering place. Information embedded in small items — a photograph, a cloth bag, a cell phone — change the motivations and desires of each character and their relationships as they hide from, fight with, and deceive each other.
Sans a plus one, I couldn’t tell you more about the plot, but based on audience laughter and applause, this play seems well-suited for translation into other languages. I found myself laughing at the characters’ frustrated romantic attempts — gym teacher Yoko (Yuko Kuwahara) letting her hand linger a little longer on the leg of English teacher Watari (Mamoru Arasawa), who in a later scene, flops his arms down from her attempts at a shared embrace. Ryo Iwamatsu as the art teacher Gaudi was the one to watch, maintaining a strong presence with a variety of gestures and mannerisms, from the rapid tapping tic of his hand to his deepening and undulating voice — and drawing guffaws as he obsessed over the contents of the cloth bag. Masako Chiba as the social studies teacher Aizawa channeled louder and larger humor, sweeping her arms grandly and slamming on tables.
The play was written and directed by five out of the six actors (Satoru Iwamatsu, Yuko Kuwahara, Masako Chiba, Hideo Tsuchida, Satoshi Hayafune), part of the Team Adabana collective. Even with the contained setting, the direction felt spacious and the world felt expansive as characters moved from hallways and backdoors, occasionally hiding in a curtained closet space to the side of the tatami mat and eating area. Watari pouring water into the eyes of English teacher Takamizawa (a vigorous and high-energy Hideo Tsuchida) as the latter splayed on the mat and howled was a particularly arresting and comic image, with the balance of power between the teachers twisting and turning.
“Sukeroku and the Black Hand Gang” by Kawatake Mokuami
The striped curtain swept across the massive stage, revealing bright red paper lanterns and painted sets of sakura (cherry blossoms) that mimicked the delicate white-pink blooms outside of the Kabuki-za theater. The lovely spring season was soon disrupted by gang leader Asagao Senpei (Ōtani Hirotarō), who arrived with several of his men and began bullying the sake seller Shinbē (Sawamura Yoshijirō) and stealing his rice wine. Black Hand gang leader and samurai Sukeroku (Matsumoto Kōshirō) appeared, ready to dole out justice and humiliate the young men for their actions against the elder. To great comic effect, Sukeroku forced each bully to crawl between his legs, the low-ranking samurai pupils cracking improvised jokes and gestures along the way.
One of the pleasures in watching Kabuki lies in relishing its distinct visuals: kumadori, makeup of fierce white paint, bold blacks, and other set colors to distinguish villains and heroes; the slow, dance-like movement of actors, especially in vibrant kimonos and bouffant katsura wigs; lavish fight choreography with twirling umbrellas and knocking blocks to imitate swords and fatal blows. And its narrative structure contrasts against the well-made American play with its tangential story lines and breaking of the fourth wall. This play included several humorous improv scenes that poked fun at the acting troupe and current events (the multi-cast Kōshirō at one point threw off his historical costume to reveal a baseball uniform underneath — he was Dodgers player Shohei Ohtani).
The play’s larger themes, around oppression and complicated heroes, resonate today. Sukeroku’s vigilante justice has consequences. The master of the bullying samurai, Torii Shinzaemon (Nakamura Shikan), seeks revenge for how his disciples are treated and reveals a deeper ancestral cycle of justice and retribution in Sukeroku’s family lineage. Our world today still contains bullies, thieves, abusers of the elderly and vulnerable. Those who stand up for them whether called hero or protagonist or savior — hold close their own complications, dilemmas, and secrets. Sukeroku, full of bravado for his fighting skills yet bound by a promise to a trusted teacher, must consent to receiving blows while holding still. Could this be a clue for how to deal with the world today? Might we have the wisdom and fortitude to know when to strike and when to hold back, knowing through honor and faith that the right action at the right time will lead to justice?
“Demon Slayer (Attack on the Swordsmith Village)” by Tsunehisa Motoyoshi
Though I don’t have a demon figurine to photograph (yet), Demon Slayer as manga (created by Koyoharu Gotōge) and anime touches me deeply for its themes of self-sacrifice and tenacity in a hellish world. During the Taishō period (1912–1926) as Japan was shifting to Westernization, the young coal seller Tanjiro returns to his home in the mountains one evening to find his family slaughtered. Only his sister Nezuko’s body is still warm. As he moves her to safety, she attacks him: infected by the demon that attacked their family, she has become one herself. Yet out of fierce love, Tanjiro cannot bear to kill her. With insatiable hope that his sister can be cured and returned to human form, he devotes his life to finding the demon that wronged them and trains to become a powerful slayer.
The thought of this fantasy epic adapted for the stage is tantalizing. Producers and audiences agree: these plays are part of the popular 2.5 jigen engkei genre (the 2.5D musical, from two-dimensional media such as anime, manga, and video games turned into theatrical productions). The first part of the series debuted in 2020, with a new season adapted each year. Attack on the Swordsmith Village is the fifth installment arc.
And the effect was stunning. Every aspect of theater—lights, costumes, props, wigs, makeup, masks, puppets, music, singing, acrobatics, stunts, projections, movement, fights, dance—was dialed up to 100 under writer and director Motoyoshi Tsuneyasu’s astute and ambitious vision. Details in manga, such as penciled lines around a character depicting action and excitement, turned into sharp rays of blinding light (designed by Manabu Kato) that the actors would step into and around, imbuing them with a godlike presence that became more breathtaking onstage than on paper. Monologues I often found too slow-paced in the anime and manga (considering the action — why launch into a speech when a hatchet is flying at your head?) were well-suited for the stage with the presence of breath, emotion, and music.
Shogo Sakamoto as Tanjiro maintained the youth’s fervor and enthusiasm, singing and fighting as he ran off walls and jumped along moving platforms. Karen Takahashi’s Nezuko was both deadly and charming, especially when relating to pink-and-green-haired Karoji Mitsuri (a bubbly and gymnastic Manaka Kawasaki), a hashira (highest ranking demon slayer) so sweet and convivial she is known as the “Hashira of Love.” As the ancient Demon King Muzan Kibutsjui, Yoshide Sasaki’s clear and resonant voice was as beautiful as it was sinister. Yusaki Kawasaki as Gyokko—the ugly spirit with multiple baby hands that emanates from a porcelain vase—billowed, jumped, and threatened with a gravely and high-pitched voice (with ingenious costuming by Kazuma Numazaki and hair and makeup from Yuri Mizusaki).
Sure, there were a few ragged edges: sometimes the actors did not quite synch up with their projections or props, or the flying wires were a little too visible. But these were forgivable, especially with the creators leaning into bunraku and kabuki techniques, showing the black-clad stagehands and puppeteers. And the heart of the production, beneath all the spectacle, showcases the mysterious and unbreakable bond between family and the courage it inspires to make the world better. Would that we all have Tanjiro’s stamina and hope.
“I think the spirit of kabuki has moved into 2.5 ji gen engkei,” said Kan Fukuhara, a Tokyo-based actor and theater-maker. We were meeting in a yakitori restaurant in Shinagawa City, along with Shumpei Mitsuhasi, a dancer and choreographer. Over Asahi beer, skewered chicken breast and cartilage, and three types of tofu, we discussed Japanese and American theater: the commercial and the experimental, the shows I had seen and was about to see, our own hopes and challenges as theater-makers. Many of these were similar. Each of us holds a desire to research and experiment, possesses a scrappiness when it comes to seeking funds, and finds a sense of unity and pleasure when we find the right collaborators.
After witnessing the stylish kabuki, the 2.5D musical, and the realism of Team Adabana, I could see what Fukuhara meant. A distinct cultural spirit emanates from theater — it’s present in the way people move, the care in the mise-en-scene, the very content of the stories from the hilarious to the mundane to the transcendent. This spirit of theater ignites the imagination and fills the heart. My experience of Japanese theater has been this insight: we need theater for how it embodies our imagination before us in real, ephemeral time, so that the sublimity of the experience may spark our own fervor, long after the flames of inspiration from the stage are reduced to coals. As individuals and groups, it is up to us to stoke and care for the hearths of our own imaginations.
I continue to mull over his comment, wondering how it could apply within my own context and practice. What are the spirits of American theater? They seem to me young spirits, still finding their way through various voices, all coming from different demographics, regions, social classes. The gods they channel are more secular than those from Japan: the American Dream, the myth of progress, sic semper tyrannis. These concepts may not be spiritual, but they are deities nonetheless, archetypes our society has drawn into our art.
How will these spirits endure? And amidst a world that blusters and bullies, how will we kindle our hearths?
