The Acton Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Kinkakuji at Japan Society
By Acton
That young man’s been watching us since we sat down, hidden in shadows at the back of the stage. And even once Kinkakuji (director Leon Ingulsrud, writers Ingulsrud and Major Curda) begins, we hear Yukio Mizoguchi’s (Major Curda) voice for a long time before he’s ready to give us a good look at him. He tells us he speaks with a stutter, but in this adaptation of the novel known in English as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, it isn’t a speech impediment at all. It’s more like a Noh incantation, repeating a phrase as if turning a jewel in the light to reveal facets of meaning. He wields his stutter like a shield, intimidating or garnering sympathy as he chooses, and describes his life lived behind a membrane that separates him from everyone else.
The subject of a young man’s intoxicating self-regard is characteristic of the novel’s author Yukio Mishima, mystic of the manosphere (the great author is cited as a favorite of YouTube star PewDiePie). So is the play’s theme of ideals so pure that the disappointment of reality builds psychic pain until it erupts into an explosive act of self-aggrandizing violence. It’s a heady (and timely) evening of theater.
Kinkakuji’s power lies in mood and character as much as it does plot. Based on the temple’s real-life destruction by arson in 1950, the story revolves around a temple whose perfect beauty is so built up in a young boy’s imagination by his father that when he finally visits the real thing, he’s left utterly shocked that reality’s shadows and deterioration can’t compete with the glowing image in his mind. Obsessed with his ideals of order and beauty, Mizoguchi becomes an acolyte at the temple, and observes the peculiar, imperfect humans he encounters as if examining them in a petri dish.
As Mizoguchi, Major Curda casts an incredible spell, drawing us in and toying with us just as his narcissistic character does with his peers, teachers, and would-be lovers. The masterful set, a series of curtains composed of hanging threads (stage designer Chiharu Shiota), becomes a web for our unreliable narrator to hide behind, dance through, and manipulate at whim. At the play’s climax, projection and video designer Takaaki Ando creates an immersive impression of violence and destruction that is as beautiful as it must be in Mizoguchi’s eyes. It’s through his eyes that we see the entirety of Kinkakuji, the story of a phoenix rising from the ashes without a thought to who got burned.
