Arts & Events

Zenshinza at Zellerbach; Palomino at the Aurora; SubShakes Reads  

Zenshinza at Zellerbach 

Zenshinza Theater Company from Tokyo, a 68-member company, will present two performances this weekend at Zellerbach Hall: Saturday at 8 p. m. two Kabuki plays, the famed aragoto ("rough style"--heroic, with exaggerated make-up and gestures) drama, Narukami (1724), one of the 18 most prized plays in kabuki repertory, in which a beautiful princess seduces an outspoken priest--and Chatsubo, adapted from an older, classical Kyogen farce, with a country bumpkin, a thief and a magistrate disputing over a teachest carried to the city ... and on Sunday, a modern historical drama, Honen and Shinran, about the two monks who created a popular form of Buddhism in the 13th century, one that worked with the common people. Tickets start at $48 (some discounts apply). 642-9988; calperfs.berkeley.edu 

But why a troupe producing both highly stylized Kabuki, a survival of the 17th through 19th century Edo (Tokyo) Shogunate, and modern historical drama. 

"The genesis of Zenshinza begins when Kabuki actors traveled to the Soviet Union in 1928 and met [theatrical innovator Konstantin] Stanislavsky," said Robert Hori, producer of Zenshina's current American tour. "We forget that the Soviet Union was as much a neighbor of Japan--and the United States!--as Europe. 

"At that time," Hori went on, "Japanese were questioning the relevance of their traditional culture--were grappling with tradition to make it relevant. Zenshina was one of the first theaters to show both kinds of drama, to put on Chekhov and Ibsen besides kabuki plays ... its actors were among the first kabuki actors to appear in motion pictures before the Second World War. It's what we'd call cross-over now." 

Zenshinza 's modern plays were influenced by the workers' theaters they'd experienced in the USSR. "Their name in Japanese means Progressive Theater." And the play about two Buddhist monks, who started lay religious orders, much like St. Francis and St. Dominic in Europe at the same time, to work with common people, fulfills that goal. 

"Honen was disturbed when his father, a provincial official who was assassinated, told him with his last words, 'Don't hate the enemy!' How could someone of the warrior caste say that? Shinran was bothered that the clerics of the time didn't serve the poor, sick, the disenfranchised of the cities. They broke the tradition of monastic Buddhism and made a total revolution--a popular revolution--in Japanese Buddhism." 

Zenshinza is touring the play, written just a few years ago, "because there's so much religious strife today. It's relevant. These monks asked what the purpose of religion was." 

The influence of the visit of the Kabuki actors went both ways. "In Sergei Eisenstein's movies," Hori noted, "There're poses and expressions by the actors that are like the mie, the special pose in Kabuki, when an actor moves in a stylized way, crosses his eyes and stands like a statue, stopping the play for a moment." Eisenstein was a student of V. S. Meyerhold, the great theater director, who said "The Grotesque is a triumph of Form over Content." Filmmaker Raul Ruiz, speaking at the Pacific Film Archive, once admiringly called silent film poses and expressions,like those in Eisenstein, "the grimace." 

"Both the Kabuki drama, of a princess seducing a priest, and the modern play about two monks who cahnge Buddhism, ask questions about religion," Hori concluded, "But even deeper--what is it to be human? I'll close with a Zen koan about a priest who confines himself to a hermitage. The woman who serves him has her doubts about his holiness, and sends her daughter in to help on a cold day, saying 'Give him a hug!'; The priest casts the young woman aside--and her mother says, 'You're supposed to be in touch with reality, not just thinking about yourself. You're not the real thing.'--and burns the hermitage down!" 

Zenshinza performers will appear in a free lecture-demo that will include Kabuki music, fight choreography, costume and make-up, 3 p. m. Friday at the Berkeley Art Museum, Durant entrance (by the Cafe and the former site of the Pacific Film Archive). 

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Palomino at the Aurora 

Wearing a short-brimmed fedora, David Cale begins to intone in a mild brogue the tale of an Irish carriage driver in Central Park, of his sexual adventures--as well as attachments and detachments they lead to--when a female procurer boards his carriage and pitches the life of a call-boy for wealthy women to him. The easy-going pace of the storyteller underlines the disparities of the stories themselves, which appear in an unusually clear focus. Later, that slightly unsettling transparence is explained: the driver was keeping a diary, with intent to write a book. 

Palomino, playing through December 5 at the Aurora, entertains with the funny edge Cale gets between voyeurism, personal interest--and even concern, in his relation to the audience. He plays Kieran, the Irishman drifter, from a loveless home who's avoided love; Vallie, the middle-aged Australian immigrant widow who becomes attached, asking Kieran to accompany her here, there and elsewhere--and, fleetingly, his first "job," as well as the object of a spontaneous seduction he makes while traveling with Vallie, and an amusing, pantomimed caricature of the procuress--plus a middle-aged gay publisher who figures in obliquely, yet becomes the story's closer. The characters are penciled in with a relaxed directness that still makes one curious who they're really talking to, as they freely tell about their lives and encounters with the others. 

It's a little like a better-than-average New Yorker story: sentimentalism with tongue in cheek, pretending to be anti-sentimental. Where it could exploit the overlap of storytelling and theater--the distortions that appear when different accounts, different perspectives of the same events are aired--Palomino falls into a kind of false naivite, covering for its lack of depth with lengthy exposition of a popular psychology bent, sometimes allowing something of the comment-free quality of great storytelling to ring true (one character's reaction to abandonment in a breakdown remembering another kind of desertion), other times talking on and on past an obvious closing line--one of them being, "It's a girl!" 

The very first solo show, at least in English--Emlyn Williams' performances of Charles Dickens on his reading tours--both demonstrated and exploited the tension and the complementary qualities between theater and storytelling with brilliance. Cale, another solo showman from Britain--and good at what he does--never takes it so far, backtracking into a kind of banality just as he starts to approach the borderline territory that Antonioni put on film ... the inexplicable, ineffable gaps and connections between people. 

(Palomino at the Aurora, 2081 Addison near Shattuck. $15-$45. 843-4822; auroratheatre.org ) 

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SubShakes Reads  

Subterranean Shakespeare presents, in their staged reading series Shakespeare's Contemporaries, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), ascribed to Cyril Tourneur (but undoubtedly by Thomas Middleton), a black comedy of Elizabethan-Jacobean revenge dramas--a great favorite of Antonin Artaud. Directed by Planet reviewer Ken Bullock, featuring David Kester, Jeff Trescott, Keith Jefferds, Pat Parker, Holly Bradford, Matthew Surrence, Howard Dillon, Kate Jopson, Max Chervin. 7:30 p. m. (doors open at 7), Monday November 15, Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar at Bonita (upstairs in side building, gate on Bonita). $8. 276-3871 

SubShakes is continuing with their polling of Shakespeare's Top Ten, the next reading series, which will play from February 7 till April 25, the Bard's birthday. To vote (Bay Area residents only), submit your Top Ten plays by Shakespeare to: shakestopten@gmail.com