I’m going to take a little breather from talking about teaching kids – back to that next time.
I was invited by a colleague to view a staged reading of Kurotama Kikaku’s Shinsai, which took place yesterday, March 11, the one-year anniversary of Japan’s devastation by the earthquake and tsunami. The director, Jun Kim, wrote in his program notes that “…the biggest purpose of this event is to convey to New Yorkers ‘what is now happening in the society of those who experienced the earthquake’ through theater using the actor’s body.” While climbing the steep wooden staircase to La Mama’s rehearsal space at 47 Great Jones’ Street, memories from thirty years ago flooded back. Ellen Stewart’s presence is felt in every nook and cranny of that precious cradle of America’s avant garde civilization, which apparently burns with the same steady fervor under the new leadership of Mia Yoo. La Mama has always encouraged a collaborations with Asian companies - as Ellen nurtured theatre artists from all over the world - but yesterday’s presentation brought a whole new dimension to the rapprochement of the American and Japanese sensibilities.
In referencing his quote, Mr. Kim encourages his actors to embody the terror of people, whose actual bodies and homes have been permanently poisoned, forcing the survivors, who may be dying themselves, to desert their indigenous culture and everything that mattered to them and their beloved ‘missing’, who in their minds may not even be dead. Nine evocative plays have been chosen to represent Japan in this endeavor, and they engage us without resorting to sentimentality or pathos. Each play is a gem in itself, and as each deepened my knowledge of the tragedy, I found myself more and more engaged with the human aspect of Japanese culture. I come from a generation brought up on the horrors of WW 11. We think of Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, their treatment of the Chinese at Nanking, as well as lasting unease about our decision to drop bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. All this history has tended to distance us from the awareness that all people are people and do not represent the actions of their governments. Certainly, as a citizen of America, I would not like to be judged on the basis of our engagement in Vietnam or Iraq. And yet it’s not judgment that I’m talking about here, but rather a lack of kinship, a lingering coolness toward a former enemy. I think this is cruel and wrong, and one of the purposes of art is to pull us across our mentally constructed no-man’s land and wake us up in the middle of the other fellow’s devastated hearth and home.
We must be cornered, however, into relating. It’s natural to avoid unpleasant matters – when they’re not sugar-coated with ‘heroics ‘ or ‘escapism.’ We know about the effects of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, resulting in mass drowning and deadly effects of radiation from the damaged plant at Fukushima. Or at least, we think we do. What more can they tell us about it? We settle into our theatre seats and feel – not think – that we’ll do a sort of penance for the next hour and a half and then we’ll be released feeling more virtuous from our efforts. Shingsai immediately insinuates itself between our inner self and our well-upholstered defense mechanism. In Abandon Home, the first play, a house wife puts up a seemingly ridiculous argument for not leaving her home in Fukushima. Her husband has brought along her brother to try to persuade her. The acting is superb; you feel compassion for everyone and their frustration with each other, but most importantly, the viewer begins to feel the complexity of the issues. The play is very short - and there is gentle humor in the performance of the wife’s brother – and yet we begin to ask ourselves questions we’ve never seriously considered before. What would I feel if I had to abandon my house and treasured belongings? Could my husband leave the only job he has ever known and actually find work somewhere else? How would I feel if the land, the nature that I love so much, was being systematically destroyed by an invisible killer and my government was lying to me about it? In the second play, A Problem of Blood, we are faced with a man who wants to donate blood but has been exposed to radiation. He threatens the nurse, who refuses to take his blood on the pretext that he is too weak to give it. And perhaps he is, but he is furious/terrified as he forces her to tell him the truth. And all this misfortune has come about through no direct action of our own.
We are American and many of us fear that our present system of government isn’t working, but we are not immediately dealing with these issues. But what if one of our nuclear plants malfunctioned, just that - no earthquake, no tsunami - couldn’t the same thing happen to us? As the program proceeds play after play, we wonder how we would behave if we were faced with people who have been exposed to radiation, rendering them dangerous to the touch? What at first seems absurd becomes possible. People can bear only so much fear and sadness before the mind starts bending truth in order to preserve sanity.
One of the most touching themes is denial relating to the people who are ‘missing.’ In The Remaining, perhaps the saddest of the group, a mother ‘sees’ her dead child and the two other characters in the play humor her. Again, there are delightful touches of humor that make it all the more human and therefore sadder. She is determined to wait for her husband, whom we know has drowned; at one point she asks, “If he’s dead why do they use the word ‘missing?’” Another play, The Sonic Life of Giant Tortoises, brilliantly summed up the situation through the metaphor of a woman, who simultaneously works at a computer in an office and hurtles along under the city, riding in a subway car. This play made me think of a situation in which one is alive and dead at the same time; randomly switching between the position of a totally detached watcher and someone who is frenetically engaged in an insane activity.
Ultimately, I found myself thinking about 9/11. For many months afterwards, I wondered, as did many other people, why hardly anyone showed up at the hospitals. For weeks, we had all wandered around at night looking at the candlelit walls covered with photos of the ‘missing’ and the names of people to contact with phone numbers when their relatives were found. One day, many months later, someone spoke of the subway train that was crushed as the buildings descended – and it was only then that I finally understood what had happened. This play made me feel the plight of people, permanently displaced from their homes, mourning loved ones on whom one building has probably already descended, as they themselves possibly or probably await the crushing weight of the other ever-descending building.
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