• 毛皮のマリー (Le Marie-Vison)

4/2/19 (Tues), Tokyo New National Theatre

This is one of four Tokyo productions in recent months of Terayama Shuji’s classic underground work from the late 1960s. This production stars Miwa Akihiro, the cross-dressing television and singing personality who was the inspiration for the show and its original star back when he was young and cute. He was so impossibly campy in Mishima’s Black Lizard a few years back that I walked out, but given his close association with this role, I figured I’d give him another chance. The direction follows that of the original hippie-era production. The Japanese and French titles (taken from a song popularized by Yves Montand) translate to something like “Marie in Mink”.

Marie is a man who lives as a woman – a not-uncommon theme in Japan, seen in such varied works as the 19th-century Kabuki piece Sannin Kichisa and Takarazuka spectacular Rose of Versailles. It is unclear whether he’s supposed to be a transvestite or transgender; he hasn’t removed his vital parts and seems sometimes to be playing a woman rather than being one. I’ll go from this point with “she” since the character presents himself as female. The show opens with her in a bathtub having a servant shave her legs and underarm hair (with a carving knife) to maintain her femininity – i.e., the mink of the title is her own body hair. She is raising a boy and insists he call her Mother, though it is not clear whether she is the true parent – there are suggestions that she may have even killed the true mother and abducted the kid, a story that may be a fiction. In any event, she has locked him up in her world so that he knows nothing else. She releases a butterfly in the room every day, which he promptly kills in order to preserve its beauty eternally before it ages (shades of Mishima). His repressed desire to escape is awakened when a new neighbor from upstairs, a butterfly girl, tries to tempt him out. He manages to leave briefly but, terrified and unable to deal with world outside, comes back and strangles the girl. The play ends as Marie dresses him in female clothing so as to mold him into a woman like herself.

The boy has essentially trapped himself, dissatisfied with the life he knows but fearful of the outside. Even as he is lured by the butterfly girl, he is drawn back by the scolding voice of his “mother”, possibly an echo in his own head. The butterfly girl herself may be an imagined fantasy, an excuse he wants to cling to in order to take the action he is otherwise incapable of pursuing. Marie is the world of the familiar, and the boy clutches in the end to the known despite the misery. There is a subplot involving a servant who also desires to become like Marie, dressing himself up in female clothing and acting diva-like, but ultimately remains in servitude to her. Despite the wild staging, it was a very evocative theme.

The plot summary, of course, doesn’t begin to describe the anything-goes mayhem taking place on stage, including deliberately unnatural acting and out-of-nowhere absurdity: an explosion of near-naked boys kicking up their heels, oral sex performed in the bathtub by Marie, the wild panoply of body builders, sumo wrestlers, 9th-century beauty Ono no Komachi and so forth. Miwa, who also directed, seems to be throwing up every oddball idea he could think of and hoping something would stick. Still, it was oddly affecting by the end as the theme falls into place. And it didn’t even end when it ended – it had the strangest curtain call I’ve ever seen.

Miwa Akihiro was underpowered in what should be a flamboyant role. I’m not sure if the restrained approach was his interpretation or just laziness; he seemed basically to be going through the motions in a part he’s been playing, after all, for more than half a century. He was not star material here. The best that can be said is that his laid-back style was a huge improvement over Black Lizard.

Other than the star, the acting was generally overripe, but that as noted was presumably intentional given the outlandish material. The best of the cast was the butterfly girl, who struck a good balance between over-the-top and sympathetic. Marie’s servant was also pretty fearless in his portrayal, if that counts for anything. One big problem was that the theater was way too big for this show, which must have been written for more intimate quarters. That diluted much of the power. Many touches seemed intended just to shock, such as the naked man emerging from the tub and running aimlessly around the room, which was probably a big deal in the 1960s. But we were just too far away to feel the impact. The direction needs a rethink for this space.

The play, though of its time, still has something to say about sticking with the bounds of the comfortable and conventional because of fear rather than true happiness. The creaky production has its moments and may be an entirely different experience with a more daring performance at its center. I’m interested in seeing the 1983 film of the stage version of that year overseen by Terayama and featuring a much younger Miwa.