Senpo Sugihara: The Japanese Schindler
Written by Koichi Hiraishi
Directed by Shoichi Yamada and Koichi Hiraishi
Performed by the Dora Theatrical Company (based in Tokyo)
Limited Engagement: October 21 to October 24, 2004
Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College, New York, NY  

The challenge in creating a dramatic work around the life of a saint is that the lives of saints are pretty undramatic.  That doesn't mean their lives lack tension or moral struggle, but almost by necessity, the play becomes a hortatory unfolding of how the saint became a saint, a paean to a life far superior to those of us sitting in the audience.  In other words, we end up not with dramatic theatre but with a eulogy dressed in theatrical clothing.

Senpo Sugihara: The Japanese Schindler, written by Koichi Hiraishi, which has been a long-running hit in Tokyo and been performed world-wide, doesn't do anything to avoid this dilemma.  For over two hours we are told the story of one man's efforts to save the lives of thousands of Jewish refuges from Poland in August 1940 as the Nazis threaten to engulf the Jews and the Soviets threaten to engulf Lithuania.  We begin the play knowing this; we end the play knowing this.  And not much changes in-between.

However, the static production doesn't take away from the gallantry of the source material.  In August 1940, the Soviet Union is poised to annex Lithuania.  Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul based in Kovno, Lithuania, faces appeals by Polish Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis for transit visas that will allow them to travel across the Soviet Union to Japan and on to the Dutch island of Curaçao off the coast of Venezuela.  (Many of the refugees had "end visas" for the island, even though they were technically worthless since the Nazis had already occupied Holland.)

The Japanese government commands Sugihara not to issue the visas because of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan.  First signed in 1936, and then renegotiated in September 1940 (in part because of Hitler's growing desire to invade the Soviet Union), the Pact committed Japan to a certain kind of neutrality in the face of any actions taken by Germany, including rounding up and killing Jews. But Sugihara defies his government and issues the transit visas, eventually hand-signing 2139 of them before the consulate is closed down and he is shipped back to Japan, where he is dismissed from his post.

The play based on this history is performed entirely in Japanese, with English surtitles.  (In 1998, when the play first came to the Kaye Playhouse, people could hear a simultaneous translation on headsets.)  And Japanese actors play all the roles, including the two Jewish families who have allied themselves as they try to make their way to safety.  (Which makes for some amusing moments, as when we hear a Japanese voice talking about "kvetching" too much.) Fumio Sato plays Sugihara with what one article called "a calm rationality and sense of purpose," and in general the cast fills the stage with energy and skill.

And, yes, we end the play admiring Sugihara's noble act (underscored by a lighting effect that places a bright halo around Sato's head as the lights go to black) and grateful for his courage and humanity, willing to believe his self-explanation that "I acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind."  But, dramatically speaking, it makes for a long evening.  So much is left unsaid and unexplored because all must be made clean and straightforward to tell the tale of the saintly deed.  No mystery need intrude, no ignoble motive must be allowed to air.  (Hillel Levine, in his 1996 book In Search of Sugihara, suggested that Sugihara was a spy and that his actions were supported by the Japanese government.  For his allegation he was slapped with a libel suit by Sugihara's widow, which was later dropped.)   Consequently, we are exhorted but, at least for me, not much moved.

But, to be honest, it is a bit churlish to judge the play this way. We have before us an exemplary act that, no matter what the motivation, saved human lives.  And if the work is dramatically dull and not the right format for the material, it is morally bright, and given the times in which we live, such brightness can help disinfect the temptation to turn toward irony and fatalism.

After its run in New York, it will travel to The Harold and Sylvia Greenberg Theatre at AmericanUniversity in Washington, DC, for performances on October 29 and 30, 2004.

Kazuki: This Is My Earth
Written and Directed by Yoshimasa Shinagawa
Limited Engagement: October 28 to October 31, 2004
Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College, New York, NY

The biography is simple, even if the story is not.  The artist Yasuo Kazuki had been drafted for service in the Japanese army in 1943.  Captured in Manchuria, the Russians buried him for two years in a work camp in Siberia, where he witnessed the starvation and death of his friends and fellow soldiers.  Released in 1945, he made his way back to his hometown of Misumi-cho (to what he called his "earth"), and for the next 29 years, until his death in 1974, painted what came to be known as the "Siberian Series," canvas after haunted canvas drawn from the tragedy of his imprisonment.

Kazuki: This Is My Earth, written and directed by Yoshimasa Shinagawa, considered one of Japan's "hot" playwrights, grounds itself in Kazuki's tormented artistic vision in an attempt, as stated in the play's press release, to "express...the lessons, hardships, and rewards" Kazuki acquired through his imprisonment and transferred to his canvases.  Shinagawa, in an interview, said the he felt American audiences, after September 11, would find Kazuki's work relevant as they struggle to make sense of their own homeland tragedy.

 The play, indeed, for two hours without intermission, gives us a full menu of "lessons, hardships, and rewards" as we follow Kazuki through his life as a young art student, then a father and art teacher, prisoner of war, and famous tortured painter.  The action jumps around in time (timelines are announced by a slide projected onto a screen), the interior of his house pivots to become the barracks at the camp, voices of the past invade the present from upper platforms at the rear of the stage, and at one point the young and elderly Yasou engage each other as they try to articulate the meaning of what has happened to them.

The production values are quite good, with versatile sets, expressive lighting, appropriate music for underscoring and scene transition, and a cast of 15 who grace the stage with energy and commitment.  Especially good are Hiroyuki Nishimoto and Jiro Tsuda, who play the older and younger Yasou, and Sachiko Yoda, portraying Kazuki's wife.

 But in the end, through no fault of the cast, crew, or playwright, the play cannot capture the hard nut of pain at the vital core of Kazuki and his work and crack it open so that it pierces the audience's vitals.  Only film could that, with its ability to jam a camera in the face of a dying man and let us watch his life drain away, or follow the stroke of a brush on rough canvas (as Scorsese does with Nick Nolte in his contribution to New York Stories in 1989, "Life Lessons"). 

Instead, we get, in essence, a biographical lecture (complete with slides of Kazuki's work) intended to leave us with an example of a life fully if not always happily lived that we can then apply to our own (admittedly half-lived) lives and make them better.  In short, it is another example of hortatory theater designed to improve us.  This does not mean that there are no stand-out dramatic and theatrical moments in the play.  For instance, the repeated recitation of a recipe by the starving soldiers in the camp for a cake drenched in maple syrup brings a surreal dark humor to the fore, and Kazuki's efforts to paint, underscored by his paintings projected onto a screen, come close to breaking through the fourth wall and letting us in to his tormented world.

 But the sum of all these parts, while certainly leaving us informed, does not necessarily leave us moved.  As playwright Shinagawa said in his interview, the play "lets us think about what is war, what is death, what is human, and what is art."  That's the problem: we certainly do think about these things as we file out of the theatre.  But we need theatre to do more than just make us think.  It needs to make us feel as if we have lived what it is we are supposed to think about.  Kazuki comes close, and for that reason alone is worth the price of admission.  But it also demonstrates the limits of "self-improvement" theatre.  Theatre should not try to improve us, which is an impossible task anyway.  It should pain us and break us open, not to improve us, but to rearrange us.  But that is an essay for another time.

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