<b>✭✭</b>✩✩✩
<b>by Daniel MacIvor, directed by Brendan Healy
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
March 21-April 14, 2013
</b>
“If a man dwells on the past, then he robs the present.” Master Po in <i>Kung Fu</i>
I was beginning to think Daniel MacIvor could never write a bad play. <i>Arigato, Tokyo</i> has proved me wrong. Quite unlike his other work, Arigato is pretentious, boring and filled with clichés. I understand that an artist would want to create a work based on the enormous stimulation that a short visit to Japan can provide, but as someone who lived and worked in Japan for two years in English and Japanese, I know that a short visit can only give a very superficial glimpse into an extraordinarily complex culture. The longer you live in Japan the more you realize how little you know.
<i>Arigato</i> follows Canadian writer Carl Dewer (David Storch) on a book tour to Tokyo. Dewer’s book, of which we hear many excepts, sound like that of an old hippie since they are all about freeing the self through sex and drugs. In Tokyo, Nushi Toshi (Cara Gee) is his interpreter and personal assistant, besides being his greatest fan. Nushi already knows about Dewer’s voracious bisexual appetite and is ready to provide sexual services herself and obligingly introduces Dewer to her brother Yori (Michael Dufays), an actor in Noh theatre, who is also willing to oblige. Dewer has been on a book tour in Tokyo before and had a relationship with the transvestite performer Etta Waki (Tyson James). In the little time he has away from Nushi and Yori, Dewer seeks out Etta to continue the affair. The crisis for Dewer comes when he realizes that he has fallen in love with Yori.
In general the point of the play is to show the chastening of a man who believes that the word “love” means nothing and can only be experienced unspoken during sex. As Dewer remarks at the end of the play he has been hoist on his own petard. From a dramatic point of view, the problem is that MacIvor is strangely unable to make any of Dewer’s three relationships seem real or to make us care about any of the four characters involved.
Part of the reason for this is the highly unnatural speech he gives the three Japanese characters. The press release for the play claims that it is “structured in the style of traditional Japanese Noh Theatre”. Who knows where that idea came from since, as someone who has seen both forms of Noh theatre in Japan, MacIvor’s play bears no relation to either <i>nō</i> or <i>kyōgen</i>. I can only assume that this remark comes from the stylized way in which MacIvor has his Japanese characters speak – all in riddles, aphorisms or Zen-like koans. Real Japanese people, of course, do not speak like that and MacIvor’s attempt at stylization is indistinguishable from old-fashioned Western portrayals of Asians as mysterious, inscrutable and innately philosophical. Many of the Japanese characters’ aphorisms sound like relics of old Charlie Chan movies or the <i>Kung Fu</i> TV series. MacIvor, thus, does not give us any insight into Japan, but rather merely a reflection of cultural clichés Europeans have propounded about Asia for centuries.
To take one example, MacIvor makes much of the notion that there are no words for yes and no in Japanese. First of all one should note that this is not actually a difference between East and West since Latin also had no dedicated words for yes and no. Second, this is a gross oversimplification since neither the Japanese not the ancient Roman culture could have thriven without means of expressing agreement or disagreement. What is much more relevant is that Japanese hosts deem it impolite to disagree in such a blunt way as a one-word answer with questions that a foreign guest poses. Levels of politeness that determine both language use and social structure in Japan is a topic MacIvor never even broaches even though is it so essential.
As MacIvor takes us on Dewer’s experiences that the press release claims are inspired by Lady Murasaki’s massive novel <i>The Tales of Genji</i> (1021ad) and we experience one example of the “mysterious East” after the next, I began thinking that all MacIvor needed to do to make his survey of clichés about Japan complete was to make reference to Puccini’s opera <i>Madama Butterfly</i>. And sure enough, by the end that’s exactly what he does.
Director Brendan Healy gives the play an immaculate production. Julie Fox’s design of a beautiful floor of polished wooden planks is meant to reflect the wooden floors of Noh theatre though they are of pine and are narrow width, rather than of dark wood and wide widths as here. The back wall of polished metal represents the contrasting modernity of the country. Kimberley Purtell supplies her usual system of discreet squares of light that can link up to become various kinds of rectangles.
Healy has drawn excellent performances from the entire cast. Storch with beard and longish hair looks rather like a wild man tamed into a suit but that well reflects the type of persona that Dewer wishes to project. He is perhaps almost too successful at making Dewer obnoxious since we really don’t care if he leaves Japan enlightened or not. If Storch can’t make Dewer’s love for Yori believable, it’s MacIvor’s fault, not Storch’s. Nevertheless, the readings he gives from Dewer’s latest book and especially the two personal reflections he offers at the end are the best written and the most effective portions of the play.
Cara Gee and Michael Dufays are quite believable as brother and sister and one can sense the competitive hostility between them that underlies their surface compliance. Tyson James makes an assured debut as Etta – great as a female impersonator, beautifully effective as a transvestite, able to wear gowns and walk in wedge-toed shoes with more style than most women. We only wish MacIvor had given the character a greater role than “assistant” and symbol. The last becomes particularly problematic at the end when we must think of him as Etta rather than as symbol for love or Tokyo, as he has earlier proposed, for the final scene to make any sense.
Unlike MacIvor’s other plays, you leave <i>Arigato, Tokyo</i>, impressed with the beauty of the production and strength of the performances but completely uninvolved with the story and the characters and certainly no wiser about what Japan is really like. What I wish is that artists, after only a short visit to Japan, would realize is that it is their ignorance and the narrowness of their own point of view that makes them confused about Japan not some inherent inscrutability or failing or, worse, malevolence as here on the part of the Japanese. I can testify that long enough residence in Japan can cause a reverse culture shock that makes what was familiar in one’s own homeland seem just as alien as Japan first seems.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: David Storch and Michael Dufays. ©2013 Jeremy Mimnagh.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://buddiesinbadtimes.com">http://buddiesinbadtimes.com</a>.
<b>2013-03-24</b>
<b>Arigato, Tokyo</b>