Review essay: LollaPalooka: Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, Written and Directed by Murai Yu. Performed in Japanese by Murai's company Kaimaku Pennant Race, with surtitles. Five Performances: 15–18 May 2019, at Japan Society in New York City

The performance space on Japan Society's stage had spectators seated so close as to be ringside the impending event. Inside the regular boxing ring was a miniature one, as though seen from the nosebleed seats. But all was right there before us, including fellow spectators. Everything in white, stimulating expectations: prefight meditation, perhaps, or merely the calm before a title bout's bloody storm? Clad in white spandex, a character appears and sits in a corner of the ring. His first lines are a recorded voice, filling the placid, mono-color atmosphere, lamenting unsettled lives, one in remote Scotland, and another in an unpromising boxing ring in Japan. We hear a Macbethian plea, "On these foggy, filthy streets of Scotland, can I find a corner of my own?" Then, from Joe? "Storm, blow away all human treachery … only my boxing ring to remain." With only one character on stage, however, we discern Macbeth is Joe and Joe Macbeth, or, rather, it's Macbeth's story, channeling Joe's: "In this world, it will be enough just to have my ring, a corner of my own!" These and other lines feature the sentence ender "—ssho!" characteristic of Japanese spoken in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island—suggesting a location Japanese know that might resemble cold, remote Scotland.

Suddenly, Macbeth encounters the witches, ensconced under the ring-within-the-ring mat, punctuating their lines with their heads successively popping up against the rubbery mat, like white blobs in a game of whack-a-mole. "This white mat," the witches say, "it's his grave for sure!" Any sense of calm now eclipsed, this stark opening's ineluctable augury jolts the spectator, vividly adumbrating Macbeth's impending rise and demise.

Tearing myself away from this fascinating action to glance at other spectators, I note intense concentration but also blank stares. Wondering about that disembodied voice, those white blobs? While

Figure 1.

Ashita no Joe/boxer Macbeth in the large ring, prior to meeting the witches. (Photo by Richard Termine)

Macbeth is among Shakespeare's most known plays in Japan, all Japanese know Joe, from Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow's Joe), the mega-hit manga running from 1968 to 1973, subsequently becoming an animé and television series.¹ Japanese spectators would not be confused, but outside Japan, while Macbeth may be widely known, who, beyond a coterie of manga/animé aficionados, knows Tomorrow's Joe? Some confusion, therefore, made sense.

Murai Yu (b. 1978), among Japan's most innovative contemporary playwright-directors, has his own take on Japan's century-plus tradition of adapting Shakespeare. On his first US foray, the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival, his hilarious Romeo and Toilet received Four Stars from TimeOut New York, citing its "fantastic combination of ingenious movement, surreal story lines and dynamic, startlingly disciplined performers" (Japan Society Presents Play Guide 2019). That pithy description also applies to his most recent adaptation, Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, its title from Tomorrow's Joe and Macbeth's witches (majo means "witch"). The manga depicts a soap-opera tale of a confused orphan, later young ex-con, whose hardscrabble life leads him to boxing and to covet a championship belt, all conflated with the upwardly manipulated Macbeth's duplicitous rise and sordid downfall and his coveted crown—rocky paths both.

Murai established his company, Kaimaku Pennant Race (KPR) in 2006, its manga-like moniker suggesting a game, as in baseball's season opener, and a play's curtain. Tokyo-based KPR is known for tongue-in-cheek, absurdist adaptations of Western masterpieces, dialogue brimming with puns and word play reflecting Japanese popular culture, especially manga, animé, and video games, and ultimately universal aspects of human endeavor. Action is stylized, quick, declamation high-decibel, humor, and site gags abundant. The stage for Romeo and Toilet, for example, was adorned with 10...