The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
Sonezaki Shinju (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki)
Sugimoto Bunraku Puppet Theater
Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, New York
October 19, 2019
"The Love Suicides at Sonezaki," which opened Lincoln's Center's tenth annual White Light Festival, tells the tale of a young Osaka shop clerk and a teenage prostitute who kill themselves rather than face life apart. It was banned in Japan in 1723 after a wave of copycat love suicides, and not performed again until 1955. The US premiere of this production showed us nothing so much as the chasm between the worlds of 18th-century Japan and 21st-century America.
That said, tribute must be paid to the brilliance of these Japanese puppeteers, practicing an art unknown in the West. Disappearing inside black shrouds, they work in teams of two or three to manipulate half-size human forms around the stage. The puppets' faces and hands are immobile, so it is just with body language -- subtle movements of the limbs and joints -- that they show an astonishing range of emotions: erotic passion, anguish, anxiety, rage, indignation both phony and real, amazement, disappointment, despair, and on and on: there's nothing humans feel that these wooden figures can't express.
Much of the tale is about the arts of concealment. Tokubei, the clerk, is done in by his inability to hide his feelings for the prostitute Ohatsu, or curb his generous impulses toward his peers. This is a young man without any guile -- a sitting duck for schemers. He gets into ruinous financial trouble by loaning money to a supposed friend, who then denies the debt and beats up his benefactor. So Tokubei loses his chance to buy Ohatsu's freedom, and their plans for marriage are dashed.
The puppetry is fascinating to watch, particularly an elaborate scene in the whorehouse where Ohatsu lives and works -- populated by smoking, drinking, gossiping ladies of the evening and their drunken customers. Tokubei is hiding under the porch, concealed by Ohatsu's long skirts, rubbing his throat against her ankle to signal his desire for death. They sneak out in the middle of the night, after putting out the lights and groping for each other in the dark.
The two then walk into a dark wood and talk interminably, bursting into tears again and again as they contemplate ending their lives. After what seems like an hour of anguished conversation, Tokubei says, "We could go on talking, but what's the point?" At this point laughter rippled through the Lincoln Center audience, decimated at intermission by the slow pace of the proceedings.
The double suicide itself takes an agonizingly long time -- as Tokubei at first shrinks back from plunging his dagger into his beloved's flesh, then does it but misses the mark. Today we're used to efficient suicides, but this messy denouement serves to show the enormity of the struggle between the demands of erotic love and the basic instinct to live.
Finally the deed is done, but the lesson it purports to teach is rings false to our sensibilities: that through this "beautiful" death, the lovers gain eternal life and become "models of true love." That might have made sense in the repressive atmosphere of feudal Japan, but it makes little sense today.
That's not the only anachronism. At the curtain call, the stage was filled with about fifty men -- the all-male cast and crew of the Sugimoto Bunraku company. What's the message in that?
Lincoln Center's White Light Festival also makes little sense to me. It's supposed to be about the spiritual dimensions of music and art, but what music or art is without spiritual dimensions? Perhaps this is just Lincoln Center's way of excusing itself from addressing the state of the world today.
Leaving the theater, one dressed-up opening-night patron said to his wife: "Let's just go home and kill ourselves."
copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips
