Play

by James Comins

Acknowlogies and Apoledgements

  There is a show that ran for more than thirty years Off Broadway called The Fantasticks, which is a story about growing up and about some of the difficulties you'll face. I first saw the show not in New York but in a remarkably good college production in Boulder, Colorado, near where I used to live. Famously, The Fantasticks is popular not only in the United States but in Japan, where it's performed every year. I was struck how the characters in the story—who were inspired by traditional Italian characters from a theater tradition called the Commedia dell'Arte, which I'll talk about shortly—were universal in their nature, even across such different cultures. The Fantasticks features a boy and a girl, but I started wondering if it's possible to tell a story where the gender and ethnicity of the main character aren't even mentioned—whether it could still be universal. That was where the story started.

  The Commedia dell'Arte is Italy's national folk theater. It began in the sixteenth century, where actors would portray familiar-looking stock characters like the Nasty Landlord, the Well-Intentioned Beggar, the Corrupt Politician, the Cowardly Soldier, the Tricky Servant, and the Woman (it was a different time). These recognizable faces developed into traditional characters with standard costumes, most famously the court jester called Harlequin, until the costumes no longer matched any kind of outfits that real people actually wore, which used to be the whole point. However, the personalities were still familiar, because every culture and every time has certain types of people.

  More specifically, Commedia characters include the romantic servant Arlecchino, who later became Harlequin or Quinn; the long-nosed trickster servant Pulchinella, who became Punch; the bragging, lying soldier who runs away from danger, Il Capitano, whom I call El Daishou (Daishou means "admiral" or "general" in Japanese); the gullible farmer Zanno, whom I call Shanne; the lovers (who were not named in the original Italian but who became Columbina and Pierrot in the French version); and a variety of others.

  The Commedia is still performed today.

  The Noh theater is Japan's folk theater. In the sixteenth century it was a tragicomic mockery of the samurai, landowners, noblemen, servants, wives, and lovers of Edo Japan. Later these folk heroes and villains would become codified until they didn't match modern society, and became fine art. Still, the characters often seem recognizable.

  There is the gullible farmer, often named Shite (pronounced shee-tay, thank you), whom I merge with the Italian character Zanno to become Shanne. Long-nosed trickster demons named Hannya, Tengu, and Oni, whom I mix with the Italian Pulchinella to become Punchinoni. Others: The cowardly soldier, the ghostly woman, the corrupt nobleman, the wicked priest, and other personalities that still make sense. Human nature only changes a little at a time.

  The Noh is still performed today, although it's less popular than its wackier and more colorful cousin, Kabuki, which features many more characters and much more singing and dancing.

  The stage where our story takes play is the Noh stage. As I mention at the beginning of the story, it's a little different from Western theaters: no curtain, a small square stage for the actors, two small orchestra pits alongside the stage, a long bridge off of stage right, thin columns in each corner, and a painting of a tree on the backdrop. Traditional Noh also features a chorus that comments on the action, as well as a small group of musicians who play hand drums called shime-daiko (smaller than the more famous taiko drums), a long flute called the nohkan, and sometimes a stringed instrument called a biwa. I've left these out mostly.

  England also has a tradition of folk theater featuring some stock characters, the most popular of whom are Mr. Punch and his wife, in the form of violent puppets called Punch & Judy.

  So let's run through our characters: Your opening role is Shanne, a combination of Shite and Zanno, the bumpkin farmer protagonist. Opposite you is the character of Punchinoni, a combination of Mr. Punch, Pulchinella, Tengu, and Oni. Punch is at first played by Quinn or Harlequin. (In later eras, the characters of Punch and Harlequin were squished together into one character, but their personalities and roles were originally different). Incidentally, both Mr. Punch and Harlequin have been written about by Neil Gaiman, whose writing strongly influences my own. Read "Harlequin Valentine" and "Mr. Punch" for more.

  Pierrot (pyair-OH), the starry-eyed clown, is the invention of exactly two actors: Baptiste Deburau and Paul Legrand. In the 1800s, they dazzled France with two similar interpretations of a romantic weeping clown who pined for Columbina and the moon, which the character often considered one and the same. I've changed Columbina to Columbia for a few reasons: first, American readers probably associate the word Columbine with the 1999 tragedy; second, Columbia is the name of the first American female liberty goddess, prior to the installation of the Statue of Liberty. She can be seen on early American coins; the laurel wreath on the dime comes from the top of her head. The capital of the United States, Washington, D.C., is named after her. Lastly, the way I describe Columbia reminds me vaguely of the character from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So it seemed like a better name.

  El Daishou is my Japanese version of Il Capitano, the braggart soldier who's never actually fought a battle. He also has some inspiration from The Fantasticks' El Gallo, the Rooster, likewise a braggart, and from Toshirô Mifune, Japan's first international movie star. El Daishou's ability to tell tall tales comes from the relentless children's folk theater I saw in New England as a kid, where putting on half-mask stage retellings of tall tales like Ananse and Pecos Bill was popular among all the middle-aged hippies of the middle 1980s.

  Those are our traditional characters.

  The Understudy is mostly me. I was basically that guy.

  In the fourth act, two more characters are introduced, characters that come from a completely different world from theater: spirituality.

  An Arhat is someone who chooses to escape from the spiritual rat race instead of helping others. Mahayana Buddhism considers true enlightenment to be helping others find spirituality. An Arhat cares only about detaching from the world, and doesn't care whether others find spirituality, too. I chose to introduce her in order to talk about the need to explore spirituality in your life; in my metaphor, an Arhat is someone who rejects the idea of helping others to explore their spirituality.

  The Green Lion is one of many metaphors that medieval alchemists used to represent the many stages of either moral development or the chemistry that supposedly went with it. The Green Lion appears halfway through the process, and represents either the ability to doubt and feel skeptical, rather than gullible, or, in a more literal sense, the creation of sulfuric acid, which dissolves literally anything that alchemists put into it, including gold. The green liquid dissolving gold was represented by a green lion eating the sun. Clever readers may find more alchemical clues throughout the book.

  So those are the characters. There are a few references to poems and such—El Daishou's last declaration is inspired by Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man," and Punch's soliloquy at the birth of the Peacock was inspired by Shakespeare, most especially Robin Longfellow's last soliloquy.

  A few other references: Don Giovanni is also called Don Juan, the famously rakish rogue who falls in love all the time and has to fight his way out of all sorts of bedrooms. The story is told best in Mozart's opera of the same name.

  Edward Teach is better known as Blackbeard the Pirate.

  Murakumo is a legendary Japanese sword known for its ability to cleave a blade of grass in half in midair. Lengthwise.

  "Dōjōji" is the third most important Noh play of the two hundred fifty or so original plays that exist. It's the only one that features a major prop other than the commonly used Japanese fan. The bell, roughly as I describe it, is used in every performance of "Dōjōji," and every Noh stage has such a bell, along with a hook and a rope. The bell is usually not real, though an actor really does hide inside it, changing costumes between acts—in the dark and often wearing a very complicated outfit. Although the bell is no
t real, it is really, really heavy, and it is absolutely possible for a careless actor to amputate their foot or even their head if the stagehands release it too quickly and you're in the wrong place. Watching a real performance of "Dōjōji" is sort of like eating fugu, poisonous blowfish—it's exciting and potentially dangerous. They still perform "Dōjōji."

  The title of the book is pronounced geki, and it changed a whole bunch of times. I'm not fluent in Japanese at all, and it's a language with much more nuance and subtlety than English has, so actually finding a word that means what you want it to mean is pretty difficult. Japanese has about twenty words meaning "play." The word that best suggests both "theater" and "fun" is shibai. However, in Hawaii the word shibai is used to refer to political speeches, so that wasn't exactly right. Geki, engeki, shingeki, and kangeki all relate in different ways to theater. Geki means to hit or strike, which, if you think about it, is pretty similar to what "act" means—either to do something or to perform in a play. Shingeki refers to foreign-inspired plays like Broadway, and that wasn't quite it. Kangeki describes the audience. Engeki most often refers to everything except Noh, which is usually just called Noh. So there isn't really a word in Japanese that covers all types of plays. But geki is the closest, and has an interesting double meaning, like the word "play" does.

  Some scenes are inspired by anime and video games, which I enjoy and which are often great portraits of Japanese culture. Pierrot's sparkling breath is inspired by Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. The face-off in the void is a pretty common theme in Japanese culture, from video games like Shin Megami Tensei to anime like Deadman Wonderland and Serial Experiments Lain. It's often a representation of a conversation inside a person's head.

  So that's where the story comes from. I hope you like it.

  About the Author

  James Comins moved to Seattle fairly recently, and will be moving to Louisiana soon. He lives with several avocado trees and a choco cookie. He is grumpy, Jewish, and filled with sparkles.