Noh Doze

Komachi

Conceived and Directed by Daniel Banks

At the Agassiz Theater

Through tonight

KOMACHI, director Daniel Banks' modern rendition of a Japanese Noh drama, aspires to dramatize conflicts between East and West, reality and abstraction, nonsense and coherence, beauty and ugliness. The real battle here, though, is sleep vs. attentiveness, and alas, slumber wins out.

To be sure, Banks' transformation one of the world's oldest extant theatrical forms into an accessible Western production--is a daunting one. And his use and integration of other media--photography, film and music--is both effective and inventive. The problems lie rather in a confusing story line and in the stiff, stylized acting that slowly deadens the strange and haunting power of Yukio Mishima's 1955 adaptation.

Banks and his actors are extremely intent on achieving a sense of unreality, an abstraction of performance, but they convey little of the direct humor and liveliness in Mishima's text.

MORE IMPORTANT, Banks does not prepare us for the unusual story that unfolds. Program notes provide some background of the ancient Noh tradition--its heavy reliance on symbolism and subtle gestures, for instance--but the notes don't explain the underlying legend with which the typical Japanese audience would already be familiar.

For your viewing comprehension, Komachi is a 99-year-old hag who, as a heartless beauty some 80 years before, had refused to yield to a suitor unless he paid her a visit every night for 100 nights; on the 100th night, he died from frustration and expectation.

In Mishima's play, a drunken poet (Tracy Cronin) encounters Komachi (Jennifer Graham) in a public park and, after a long, strange conversation that transports them back 80 years, finds himself repeating the suitor's role and painful death.

THE ACTION of the play opens with Komachi collecting cigarette butts from the ground. Graham is hunched over a bit but neither her movements nor her voice suggest a tortured, remorseful old woman. Her speech is too clear and sharp for the naturalistic mood of the script.

Cronin, meanwhile, cuts a curious figure as the poet; she neither looks or acts much like a man. The two argue over love, death, beauty, and haggard old age, but the passions and emotions conveyed by the two actors are less than riveting.

The best things in Komachi do not happen on stage--images flashed across a large screen at the back of the stage and voices and music on the soundtrack are more powerful than the acting. Using these three elements, Banks' prelude starts off his production in excellent form.

The stage is dressed in stark white, the screen shows bizarre close-ups of fish, and the soundtrack makes it sound as if these fish are screaming every time they open their mouths to breathe. A propulsive and eerie score is then joined by a multi-voiced reading of the Austrian writer Peter Handke's Prophecy. A series of isolated and unpleasant predictions like "the flies will die like flies, the open wound will fester like an open wound" echo throughout the theater.

Banks puts another text to good use: an excerpt from Beckett's Rockabye--"Time she stopped. Time stopped..."--signals the end of the play. Both additions contribute intriguingly non-sensical asides to the production. Even better are the photography and films that appear on the screen throughout the work; they are often mesmerizing and pleasantly distracting.

Banks' commitment to and reverence for the riddles and beauty in the Noh tradition is admirable; his work is often thought-provoking. But the staging at the Agassiz simply does not have the spiritual aura or nuanced acting to carry an audience through an hour of abstracted performance. Noh business is not show business, and doesn't try to be, but Komachi is too slow and awkward to be very rewarding.