Stage:

...GERALD WEALES...

...So too with Greenspan's Gonza...

...But he is a cool and calculating young samurai who is willing to do almost anything-desert the young woman he has seduced, marry for advancement-to get ahead in a samurai-eat-samurai world...

...yet, one comes away not simply with an appreciation of his theatrical tricks but with a clear feeling for the duplicitous charm of Gonza and the prim lust of Osai...

...I cannot see what it has to do with Chikamatsu's eighteenth-century puppet play, but there is a great deal going on at the Public that does not seem particularly Chikamatsu, but which is no less enjoyable for all that...

...Greenspan sticks to the Chikamatsu text, in Keene's translation, but he has his cast speak with a deliberateness that underlines the artificiality of the story, already established by the Narrator...

...It is the look of the piece...

...The battle scenes-conventionally boring in most productions- are a delight here, full of acrobatic tricks that turn the battlefield into a deadly playground...

...By the time my rational mind had begun to work enough to tell me that the actress was riding a cherry picker, the image had done its work...

...having made the false accusations true, they wander until the wronged Ichinoshin has a chance to kill them, restoring honor all around...

...As Donald Keene says in his introduction to Major Plays of Chikamatsu, Gonza is an unlikely hero, like the villains of Chikamatsu's other domestic tragedies...

...While the real Shakespeare was being translated at BAM, Chikamatsu (sometimes called the Japanese Shakespeare) was being transformed at the Public Theater...

...The witches first appear, visible through a curtain, ornately costumed as though they were cousins to a lion-hearted figure from Kabuki and moving to a properly demonic choreography...

...STAGE PITFALLS OF AMBITION 'NINAGAWA MACBETH' & 'GONZA When Yukio Ninagawa's production of Medea played at the Delacorte in Central Park in 1986, the director solved a problem that I have with the Euripides play, At the end, when a dragon-drawn chariot is supposed to carry Medea off into the sky, earlier productions I have seen settled for letting the actress deliver her final lines from a rooftop and then obscuring the actual ascent...

...There is a ludicrous edge to all this when Macbeth, like Douglas Fairbanks or Bob Hope in Monsieur Beaucaire, holds off a platoon of assailants or when a murderer at Macduff's castle does a complete somersault in the air before he plunges a pike into the ragdoll baby...

...Ninagawa's Medea spoke her piece from a chariot of sorts, and then began to rise-up and up and incredibly up-until she disappeared into the summer sky over Central Park...

...It did not engender a great deal of audience emotion, but then the play seldom does in English...

...There is nothing in the Ninagawa Macbeth (the director's name has become part of the title) as exciting, as flamboyantly right as the end of Medea, but the recent production at the BAM Next Wave Festival showed once again that Ninagawa is a master of stage picture, of theatrical effect...

...The action-even when some of the characters are props-usually follows the narrative, but sometimes it works by opposites, as with a very graphic cunnilingual scene juxtaposed with the Narrator's description of the couple's tearful embraces...

...Lear can break your heart, but Macbeth is too obviously a come-uppance tragedy for that, a suspense drama that depends on fulfilling the ambiguous prophecies of the witches...

...What he is after, as a program note says, is "a particular period or place that concentrates on the dark areas of human nature...

...His staging is fascinating, but the devices are essentially distancing...

...It is comforting that such inventive directors chose and remained loyal to plays about the pitfalls of ambition...

...My descriptions may make all this sound like the guying of Macbeth, but even when Ninagawa's choices seem the most outrageous, the play remains Shakespeare's tragedy...

...The director has moved Macbeth to sixteenth-century Japan and has forested Birnam Wood with cherry trees, but he has not-as Kurosawa did in his 1957 movie Throne of Blood- rewritten the play to fit his own theatrical agenda...

...Beyond that, he uses sexual and racial cross-casting and mixes swords of the period with contemporary dress and props...

...Masane Tsukayama's Macbeth has a couple of strong emotional scenes and Komaki Kurihara's Lady Macbeth has the most athletic sleepwalking scene I can remember (she even rolls down a flight of steps), but it is not the characters, however well played, that make the Ninagawa Macbeth so effective...

...I did not listen to Faubion Bower's simultaneous translation, but it seemed to me that the production stuck to Shakespeare, scene by scene, line by line...

...Perhaps he thinks a man in a woman's role or a very blonde Japanese woman or a picnic thermos as a keg for sake is in some way a workable gloss on puppets as flesh-and-blood people...

...the best that Macbeth can offer the audience is his almost playful determination to go down fighting a battle that he knows is lost...

...Gonza, as the Narrator says at the beginning of the play, is "so good-looking people acclaim him in song...

...The trick in puppet plays is for the audience's initial attraction to the mechanics of the performance to give way to a concern for the characters and their story...

...Let me give just two examples...

...Both the Ninagawa Macbeth and Greenspan's Gonza the Lancer are reminders that the pleasures of theatricality need not swallow thematic seriousness...

...The actors-Koji Okamura and Mary Schultz-have much to do with this, but their performances are only possible because there is a space left in the artifice for emotion to find a home...

...He uses puppets as well, a whole figure for the son of Osai, the runaway woman...

...they are approached by Macbeth and Banquo on horseback for no reason except that Ninagawa sees the theatrical value of vaudeville horses not played for laughs...

...one of her daughters is a doll's head on a walking stick and later the two daughters become a wine glass and a napkin...

...David Greenspan introduces his production of Gonza the Lancer with a monologue by way of prologue, an odd and oddly appealing piece of his own in which pronouns run amuck without completely killing the possibility of sense...

...Gonza, who has been manipulative at the beginning, self-pitying later, regains his fame and his name when-like Macbeth-he goes down fighting...

...Through a series of accidents, Gonza is presumed to have committed adultery with his master's wife, and the two of them are forced to flee together...