Silence

...Like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, with which it shares many themes, Silence explores the idea that flawed human beings can still be ministers of grace...

...Fujimoto is the least color-infatuated cameraman now working in this country, and most of his work (Melvin and Howard, The Silence of the Lambs) dwells in one's memory as black-and-white rather than Technicolor...

...In the words of the philosopher Francis Bacon, who had barely been dead a decade by 1637, when the action of Silence takes place: "If a man will begin with certainties, he will end with doubts...

...In scenes that bounce thematically off the gospel story, and that frequently pose scenes of death against the backdrop of the sea, Silence wrestles with the notion of certainty...

...By the end of the play, the path of uncertainty, rejection of religious absolutism, willingness to suspect oneself of hubris, humility in the face of other cultures and even of events begins to seem preferable to unswerving conviction, no matter how theologically orthodox...

...Beloved isn't just a mess...

...But after that, Beloved suffers still another lapse...

...Arriving in the coastal region near Nagasaki, Rodrigues and his partner, Garrpe (Torrey Hanson), find that the authorities are rooting out surreptitious Christianity by forcing local villagers to trample upon plaques of Christ and the Virgin...

...Here he achieves a sort of brownbleached-to-yellow look that is perfect for both the realistic and the supernatural scenes...

...Crying these lines, Ernst's voice quavered, became full of emotion, changed in resonance from sentence to sentence...

...But Zia's Cincinnati projects the hum and bustle of a real, growing city where life will continue long past the final credits...

...Missionaries, persecutors, and the faithful played out the main drama on the nearly bare forestage, but the images that guided and haunted them--priests celebrating Mass back in Portugal, a Japanese magistrate on a thronelike seat, Japanese converts crudried on a beach---appeared through the scrim, so that they seemed to exist in a separate reality...

...In an author's note included in the program, Dietz recalled that, on meeting the eminent Catholic author whose novel he wanted to adapt, he wondered, "Why would this man entrust his masterpiece to me...

...Why this silence...

...As the Grand Inquisitor-like interpreter (Yukihiro Yoshida in the Subaru production) batters Rodrigues with relentless temptation and argument, the Jesuit's confidence crumbles...

...How can God witness the persecution of Christians and do nothing...

...Those who refuse are killed or imprisoned...

...q'hat is the age-old question," the priest observes...

...Endo knew that by encountering Japan through the historical prism of his novel, I would be forced to become, in a sense, a missionary...

...The play's trajectory is launched from an apostasy, as the assured young Jesuit Rodrigues (Lee E. Ernst) hears that his former teacher has renounced Christianity while working as a missionary in Japan...

...The re-creation of the Cincinnati of 1873 is a far finer achievement than the pre-Civil War Connecticut in Amistad or the turn-of-the-century New York of Milos Foreman's Ragt/me...

...When a sort of ladies' aid society marches over to Sethe's house to exorcise it, the fine line between ludicrousness and grandeur is deftly negotiated...

...And yet in Silence, Steven Dietz's stage adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel, the sea, with its brutal indifference to human life, begins to signal a kind of silence to a devastated young missionary...

...The concept of uncertainty, which colors Dietz's script, also shaded the performances in the Subaru staging...

...n d what is the age-old answer...

...I must also note that in the final halfhour of this 185-minute movie, Jonathan Demme finally breaks through to the combination of off-beat humor, generosity, and suspense that distinguishes his finest work (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild...

...The play's harrowing conclusion shows Rodrigues and his colleague answering these questions in opposite ways...

...It was when Rodrigues first experienced doubt, standing alone in an abandoned village just before his capture, that the production really took off...

...Perhaps his own zeal, his fervent endorsement of martyrdom, are forms of hardheartedness...

...When they are captured, the two priests confront the same test, the price of their refusal being the torture and murder of the converts they have ministered to...

...Best of all is the great veteran actress Beau Richards as a village elder who nurtures the spirits of the newly self-liberated slaves...

...Designer Kent Dorsey created a look for the piece relying almost entirely on lights thrown on and through a translucent screen...

...Watching those two films, you may have marveled at the meticulousness of the settings, but also sensed the presence of a strike crew just off camera, ready to demolish everything once the shooting stopped...

...Though dramatically stiff and rhythmically choppy, the play, which was performed by Japanese and American actors (and co-directed by Joseph Hanreddy and Ganshi Murata) delivered confrontations so profound and immediate that aesthetics seemed to fade into the background...

...While reminding us how painful it can be to reach away from certainty toward the unknown, Dietz's play suggests that the process can lead to revelation...

...Trying to raise Sethe's spirits after another traumatic loss, Paul D. tells her, "You are your own best thing" and "Love your heart...

...W ost people would not associate the quality of silence with the sea...

...There is also good work by designer Kristi Zia and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto...

...Her exhortation to them to express their joy doesn't need verbal richness because Richards so poignantly reaches for the words she needs that the ache for eloquence is moving enough...

...The American playwright concluded, "I think that Mr...

...I would be required, over time, to abandon my prejudices (both cultural and theatrical) in the service of something unknown to me...

...his tormentor rejoins, taunting the pious young man with the insufficiency of his philosophy...

...As the story unfolds, doubt becomes another aspect of human frailty, perhaps the most important aspect...

...Perhaps the campaign to spread Christianity across the world is nothing more than arrogant cultural imperialism...

...but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties...

...Why is there evil in Commonweal 2 0 November20, 1998 the world, the jaunty interpreter demands during a debate with Rodrigues...

...When the faithful are suffering for God's sake, Rodrigues begins to wonder, why does God refuse to grant them, if not help, then at least a sign of his presence...

...Our Lord, too, entrusted himself to the most untrustworthy of men," one priest points out...

...By such means military authorities more or less eliminated Japanese Christianity during the seventeenthcentury's first sixty years...

...Even the scenic design seemed to allude to the instability of human knowledge...

...The play broke free from history to involve and, what is more to its credit, disturb a modern audience...

...Commonweal 2 II November20, 1998...

...Is this what you say to a woman who has lost three of her children, killed One of them herself, and been forced into earthly hell by a semi-demonic spirit...

...This visual device hinted that belief follows in the wake of powerful images, and that as new images appear, belief can change...

...It's a mess made out of mush...

...Act l's early scenes in Portugal and the Jesuits' Chinese outpost were stilted and stagy, and Ernst's delivery was flat...

...An effect like the pure light-and-color segue between a circular stained glass window and the Japanese Rising Sun, both projected on the scrim, reminded the audience that cultural exchange also involves changing images...

...At the same time, the production's shifting images did not seem entirely the province of mysticism...

...The Theater Company Subaru production of Silence, which traveled to several American cities in October, was an agonizing study of belief and the limits of human certainty...

...The rumor, and the reports of the cruel oppression of Japanese Christians, only strengthen Rodrigues's eagerness for his own mission to the country...

...Caught in seventeenth-century Japan during the savage persecution of Christians, Father Rodrigues feels his faith wavering when no miracles answer human pain...