• アメリカの時計 (The American Clock)

9/18/23 (Mon), Yokohama

A Japanese production of this lesser known 1980 drama by Arthur Miller based on his own family’s experience during the Depression. The family here – a successful businessman who plays the markets obsessively, his music-loving wife, and the son who aspires to be a writer (Miller, of course) – finds itself upended by the stock and economic crash. They are forced to move out of their fancy Manhattan address into a low-end apartment in Brooklyn, and their dreams gradually give way to the harsh reality of life in the 1930s, best symbolized by the mother’s gradual piece-by-piece selloff of her precious jewelry and finally the heartbreaking repossession of her beloved piano.

Miller, inspired by Studs Terkel’s chronicles of the lives of working families, interweaves the family’s story with those of a vast range of characters from shoeshine boys to beggars to socialist comic strip artists, all seeking an opportunity – any opportunity – amid unemployment, homelessness, and grinding poverty. The failings of the market-driven economy have stripped people not only of their possessions but of hope itself. Struggling farmers take decisive action against a judge seeking to auction off their lands, the sister of a stock broker learns of his suicide, a daughter is practically auctioned off by her desperate mother to the landlord’s son, a black character notes, “The main thing about the Depression is that it finally hit the white people.” The sweeping narrative is presumably intended to give us the big picture of how deeply the Depression affected the nation’s soul and how the people were betrayed by the capitalist ideas that they had believed in, familiar grounds for the author.

The problem is that the scope of the story gives us little individual time with the dizzying number of persons appearing throughout, making it difficult to follow over the three-hour running time. The show also relies on the tired device of a narrator to deliver important information that I would have preferred in the form of drama. I wish Miller would have concentrated on the family, whose story by itself was moving, and trimmed the rest to digestible size. The hectoring nature of some of the monologues and dialogues didn’t help, and the ending is unclear.

Arthur Miller is a familiar name in Japan – A View from the Bridge is playing in Tokyo at present, and A Death of a Salesman and All My Sons had major revivals last year – but this play seems an odd choice given the many historical, ethnic and cultural references and specific character types that won’t always be familiar here. A free program provided a glossary that explained many of these (e.g., Lindbergh, Oyster Bay, Civil War – interestingly there’s a glossary in the English script as well). Other parts proved tougher: director Nagatsuka Keishi eliminated or glossed over many of the Jewish elements, which he probably didn’t catch anyway, and with the lack of stage makeup, I wonder if the audience even realized that three characters among the all-Japanese cast were supposed to be black (though that’s not necessarily the director’s fault in these sensitive times). His presentation came across as rather generic. While that might have been enough to convey the broad theme, I wish he had been more adventurous.

The stage was largely bare with a dirt floor, an upright piano at stage left, and props in the back that were used over the course of the show. There was a large video screen placed at a tilt above the stage displaying an array of images: realistic ones like New York streets, Shibuya Crossing (for some reason), cloudy skies, and a rainy roof, along with abstract ones like a simple small yellow square. Photos of rich industrialists from Ford to Musk filled the screen at one point in striking contrast with the fraught masses on stage.

The director handled the panoply of characters smoothly, adeptly shuffling 13 actors among the several dozen roles. The cast members generally sat on chairs in back waiting their turn in full view of the audience, sometimes changing clothes there as needed. The transitions were aided by the skillful use of lighting and props.

The one major downer of this production was the music, which plays a key role in the play. Several numbers are sung by the wife or others as part of the story, and the son composes his own song (written by Miller), which is naturally in the style of the times. The songs listed in the script are mainly among the great jazz standards of the day, which were as much a part of the nation’s soundtrack then as, say, rock-and-roll and Elvis in the 1950s. The music used here, however, was from the 1970-80s, which I assume is the director’s era. That included a Jackson Five number, “Your Song” (which the director might have heard last month in Moulin Rouge), and something apparently by Alicia Keys. The only song that remained intact was the minor “He Loves and She Loves” (nicely sung by Sylvia Grab as the wife) from the musical Funny Face, which the character had gone to see. Everything else was irrelevant both musically and lyrically. The director reportedly didn’t know the songs that were referred to in the text and just picked music that he liked, whether it fit the setting or not. I’m sure he’ll claim to be shedding new light on the material, but it stood out in a very bad way. Japanese directors are always cavalier about the music in their shows, but I was shocked this time since the songs are actually specified in the script. Changing those particular numbers is not necessarily a problem, especially since the rights are probably expensive, but the director should at least choose songs to fit the Jazz Age and Depression Era setting. I wonder how they’d feel if a foreign director featured a serious drama set in postwar Japan using J-Pop music. Audiences don’t have to understand the words, which needn’t relate overtly to the story anyway. (The one exception is “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries”, which does comment on the action, but that number actually exists in a Japanese version – Grab has sung it before on stage in a local musical.) Nor do the songs have to be familiar to audiences here. The numbers just need to be something conveying the spirit of the times, and there’s a tremendous catalogue to choose from – that era was and remains the Golden Age of American music. Justifying the switch as avant-garde or such is just an excuse to be lazy. Pitiful.

The cast was excellent all around, especially Yasaki Hiroshi as the son and Grab as the wife/mother Rose. The theme of the show – the clock ticking down on the American experiment, the danger of an economy dependent on ever-rising stock and property prices backed by nothing but blind faith – is still relevant (including ominous parallels with the present), but the show is too sprawling to drive the point home. Still, it does offer a valuable picture of a bleak era when hope seemed a luxury none could afford, an image that perhaps could only come from someone who experienced it, and the panoramic sweep suggests the scale of the tragedy. While the anti-capitalist screed can become wearing, the play has much to offer. For all the faults of the show itself, this production – aside from the horrific music – makes a decent case for it.