P4M THEATER REVIEW: Benten Kozo, The Flea Theater (NY)
I've been so fucking busy that I didn't get to see Benten Kozo, this new adaptation of a classic Kabuki play, until last night. It opened, like, a month ago and everybody's been telling me that the production's brilliant-- especially people whom I respect for having finely-tuned bullshit detectors that can pick out the pretentious, artsy, jerk-off sputum from a mile away. So I went down to this tiny but well-run theater in Tribeca called The Flea, and you know what? The production is fucking brilliant.
Kabuki was invented as a real people's theater, right, so the artform is full of highly entertaining characters and wildly dramatic situations-- not unlike a hit TV sit-dram, except that kabuki plays also have coarse jokes, scary demons, fighting, dancing, singing, drumming, cross-dressing, fright wigs and fright make-up, quick-change hi-jinx, and other theatrical trickery that does a good job of keeping audiences from snoozing. I won't (and probably can't, in such a limited amount of space) tell you the convoluted story of Benten Kozo-- except to say that it's about this ultra-wiley bandit and his team of four wiley bandit friends. But I will tell you some of the things that can go wrong in a production like this, all of which I was afraid of when I walked in, despite what my friends had said: gratituous modernizations, condescending direction, amateurish acting, ludicrous costuming, and excruciating length.
But Benten Kozo has none of that. Instead, the play has been contemporized judiciously with some really smart writing and street-wise costuming. The director, Jim Simpson, obviously loves the material and the characters, and made sure the (almost 30!) actors do, too. The mostly American-trained actors, by the way, do a surprisingly good job of recreating, in their own terms, many of kabuki's conventions, rather than mimicking them (as they would do poorly, inevitably). And the whole thing takes about two hours. So go see Benten Kozo before the thing closes on March 31, or I'm gonna to feel even guiltier that I was't able to tell you about this gem sooner.
Kabuki was invented as a real people's theater, right, so the artform is full of highly entertaining characters and wildly dramatic situations-- not unlike a hit TV sit-dram, except that kabuki plays also have coarse jokes, scary demons, fighting, dancing, singing, drumming, cross-dressing, fright wigs and fright make-up, quick-change hi-jinx, and other theatrical trickery that does a good job of keeping audiences from snoozing. I won't (and probably can't, in such a limited amount of space) tell you the convoluted story of Benten Kozo-- except to say that it's about this ultra-wiley bandit and his team of four wiley bandit friends. But I will tell you some of the things that can go wrong in a production like this, all of which I was afraid of when I walked in, despite what my friends had said: gratituous modernizations, condescending direction, amateurish acting, ludicrous costuming, and excruciating length.
But Benten Kozo has none of that. Instead, the play has been contemporized judiciously with some really smart writing and street-wise costuming. The director, Jim Simpson, obviously loves the material and the characters, and made sure the (almost 30!) actors do, too. The mostly American-trained actors, by the way, do a surprisingly good job of recreating, in their own terms, many of kabuki's conventions, rather than mimicking them (as they would do poorly, inevitably). And the whole thing takes about two hours. So go see Benten Kozo before the thing closes on March 31, or I'm gonna to feel even guiltier that I was't able to tell you about this gem sooner.
posted by Lucia Toledo at 9:43 AM
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