Rape, murder, and other shenanigans in Rashomon
Ventura County Reporter, 1/15/08
Lust, betrayal, avarice, rape and murder – such might seem to be heady themes for community theater, but they’re courageously tackled this month in Gothic Productions’ take on the classic Rashomon, staged in Thousand Oaks’ Hillcrest Center for the Arts, now through January 25.
When Sir Walter Scott penned in 1809 “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” he might well have been presaging the morality of this deeply complex tale, which is recounted in multiple flashbacks through the widely divergent points-of-view of its ill-fated players. When a notorious bandit rapes a noblewoman and seemingly murders her samurai husband, eleventh-century magistrates are confounded as four eyewitness testimonies reveal incompatible versions of not only the crimes, but also the motives and passions by which they are inspired. The narrative device renders such stalwart dramatic personae as antagonists and protagonists in hues too subtle and changeable to be relied upon or even truly recognized, leaving the ultimate interpretation of justice and morality to the audience, as the feudal magistrate remains mute, and in this case, ultimately moot.
Though credited to playwrights Fay and Michael Kanin and based on the century-old works of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa -- regarded as the father of the Japanese short story -- Rashomon’s most well-known and celebrated incarnation came in the 1950 Akira Kurosawa classic film that’s widely regarded as Japanese cinema’s coming-out party to the world. Kurosawa’s film was honored with the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion in 1951, and took home an ‘honorary’ Academy Award in 1953 (the award for Best Foreign Language Film wasn’t established until 1956). Though the Kanins’ work cites only Akutagawa, it closely adheres to the beats of the screenplay, penned by Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto. Whether on stage or screen, Kanin or Kurosawa, Rashomon has left an indelible imprint on our culture. We see its themes repeated in numerous contemporary productions, from last year’s Vantage Point to Courage Under Fire and The Usual Suspects; in contemporary jurisprudence, divergent witness testimony is known as The Rashomon Effect, demonstrating once again the manner in which great art and life each reflect the other.
There’s much to admire in Gothic Productions’ mounting of the work – the mad passion of Erik Melton’s notorious Tajormaru the bandit; the many faces of Lauren Girard, who, as the wife, is at turns the shattered victim, the willing coquette, and the scornful shrew; in Alex Matnte’s simple yet increasingly complicit woodcutter. If Theresa Secor’s direction is at times a bit loose, and her sound effects a tad clumsy, such is eminently forgivable in such ambitious fare. S.B. Murray’s set design provides a cogent and appealing backdrop for the tale’s changing frame, with the shattered Rashomon gate overseeing the rest of the stage as it frames the recounting of the tragedy. While Kurosawa’s deeply textured study of light and shadow was hailed as symbolic of deeply intermingled shades of virtue and sin, truth and falsehood, Secor’s direction leaves such in the hands of her performers, who prove generally up to the formidable task.
In Gothic Productions' Rashomon we find an apt exploration of a confounding age, even as it hearkens back a thousand years. Contemporary audiences will be too familiar with its increasingly blurred morality and shifting frame that leaves us to draw our own conclusions after digesting, as best we can, the at-odds testimony of supposed experts, and as would-be justice proves more often a case of opinion than judiciary machination.
“You want people to be big,” laments Rashomon’s noble playwrights; “Big heroes, big villains, big anything-- but no, they are all small, weak, cowardly, and faithless.” In Gothic’s production, however, quite an opposite alchemy occurs, as small theater ably evokes themes that prove, in word and deed, altogether larger than life.
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