Creating a Kabuki Western: Revenge at Spider Mountain

Creating a Kabuki Western: Revenge at Spider Mountain LEONARD PRONKO With its larger-than-life characters, frank theatricality and rich use of such antagonisms as virtue and villainy, courage and cowardice, rectitude and corruption, all often leading to an act of revenge, Kabuki seems a natural form in which to cast some of the more stylized legends and historical events of western civilization. Terrifying myths of the ancient world, heroic sagas of the Middle Ages, high adventure in the developing western frontier, all of these would lend themselves to Kabuki treatment. During twenty-five years of Kabuki productions, in addition to such Japanese classics as Narukami, Ibaraki and Gohiiki Kanjincho, the Drama Department at Pomona College has staged Kabuki versions of western classics like Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy. New pieces have also been created based on western history, literature and legend like Oedipus at Phokis, Atahualpa, Lancelot Bewitched, and Fireplay: the Legend of Prometheus. In 1977 two students and I wrote a Kabuki western that was so well received that, when we opened a new theatre in 1991 and celebrated at the same time twenty-five years of Kabuki at Pomona College it was decided to revive Revenge at Spider Mountain. CREATING THE TEXT The thematic conventions of the western are, perhaps not surprisingJyI often similar to those of Kabuki, for both forms are popular entertainments conceived around situations that inspire melodramatic treatment: the mysterious wronged hero, the noble soul pitted against the corrupt establishment, the virtuous heroine in peril and usually saved by the admirable hero, the search for an enemy and revenge. I had read Dee Brown's study of the U.S. government 's betrayal of the Indian treaties in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; and it struck me that the struggle Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 173 174 LEONARD PRONKO between the Native American and the white man offered a world of meaningful material for our play. It is also a prevalent theme in the movie westem, but we intended to give it a less biased treatment. Critics of Kabuki have pointed out that one of its shortcomings for a modem audience is a lack of any ideological dimension: it need not be didactic, but there is a feeling that it should speak in meaningful terms to a contemporary spectator on some serious issue. We hoped to confront this shortcoming and perhaps remedy it without turning the play into a sermon. The three playwrights (and it might be good to remember that for many years Kabuki plays were written by teams of playwrights) approached the text from varying points: Ardwight Chamberlain and Jefferson Eliot were connoisseurs of film and knew the western genre very well; their experience with Kabuki was somewhat limited: they had participated in earlierproductions and read texts and viewed films and video. I, on the other hand, was well-versed in Kabuki but knew the western only from the dim memory of films I had seen years earlier. The collaboration was very healthy one, because I was constantly pulling in the direction of Kabuki and high style, while my co-authors kept pulling me toward the conventions of the western and the realism of that form. As it turned out.. most of the more realistic scenes were written by Chamberlain and Eliot, while I wrote most of those in high style or using verse. But there was a fruitful give and take, as each supplied what the others lacked. If Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was the source for much that was American in Revenge at Spider Mountain, the Kabuki inspiration came from three major Kabuki scenes or plays. Indeed, one might say that the three Kabuki scenes were the starting point: in particular. the famous anchor scene (Daimotsu ural and travel-dance scene (michiyuki) from the history play, Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (Yoshitsune sembonzakura),' and the late nineteenth-century classic dance play, The Monstrous Spider (Tsuchigumo).' The Thousand Cherry Trees is one of the "three great history plays" in the Kabuki repertoire. Originally written for the puppet theatre, it relates events of the final days...