Dionysus (review)

This review should be written in dramatic verse. No ordinary prose can capture the emotional resonance the Suzuki Company brings to the stage under the direction of legendary theorist and actor-trainer Tadashi Suzuki. This performance achieves such an intensity of contact between performer and spectator that for seventy precious minutes, hearts do more than beat—they vibrate, they thrum in unison with the actors' voices on stage, animal voices, with roots in the earth, offering up baleful warning and ancient woe.

Suzuki's stage is black and bare. Blocks of granite, heavy and black with age, form the upstage wall. They represent a temple wall that is imposing, permanent, and unchangeable in ancient Thebes. Six wicker chairs representing priestly thrones stand like sentries before the wall, each in a square of pale, gold light. A tin whistle pierces the air as Dionysus takes the stage. Six priests enter, six aspects of a single incarnation. They have the uniform appearance of terra cotta soldiers: gray face, gray kimono, gray conical hat, with minor differences in facial hair or apparel. When they speak, they speak in perfect unison, engaging Pentheus in a single, terrible voice; when they move, they control time and space. They can whirl and stream and flow across stage together like a festive dragon, or sustain individual poses for ten minutes without so much as a blink.

Such performances are possible by way of Suzuki's actor training method. The rigorous program—involving stomping drills and loud, unison recitations—puts strength in the legs and torso, giving actors supreme body control and deep vocal power. Suzuki's actors do not enter the stage; they materialize. They do not cross; they glide. And they do not speak; they enunciate. By teaching them the grammar of the feet, Suzuki enables his actors to move and speak with precision. Their legs give them the voice of the earth. They speak from perfect balance. The whole body exults, and the whole body grieves, allowing for a fullness of woe that lays open the sacred pain of life central to Euripides' great tragedy.

No moment captures this holy anguish more perfectly on Suzuki's plain black stage than the moment when Agave discovers the head of Pentheus in her fist. American actor Ellen Lauren, disciple and instructor of Suzuki's acting method, transforms Agave into the Voice of Grief. Turning her head to behold the wretched object (Suzuki spares his spectators the distraction of a realistic severed head by using an obviously artificial one), her mouth slowly opens, and opens, and opens, making room for a scream that will shatter the world. However, it never comes, and there she is, her mouth open to the splitting point, falling backward, bending to the earth in perfect silence when finally a wisp escapes, a tiny shriek of life as she comes upright, one eye crossed, her neck a striate fan of tendons and veins. Fear reigns in the theatre as the inexpressible takes on human form.

Yoichi Takemori, in the role of Pentheus, combines force, poise, and stamina. As a Theban ruler, he is defiant, kingly, controlled; as a possessed convert, he is manic, giddy, intoxicated. He mounts Cithaeron in female disguise, happily clutching his walking staff. Here, Suzuki strays from Euripides' text so that Pentheus, rather than falling victim to the frenzied Bacchae offstage, suffers dismemberment onstage by the six priests of Dionysus. They sweep and sail around Pentheus in a graceful, menacing circle, and then close in for the kill. They draw their shiny blades. In slow, delicious cuts, Pentheus is unstrung. Limbs do not leave his body but rather sag, wilt, then disappear altogether into his flowery, yellow kimono—arms first, then legs—until, by some unseen technique requiring perfect balance from Takemori, only the head of Pentheus is left, dead, atop his staff.

Agave and Pentheus, plainly put, are scapegoats in a fight between radical religion and the political...