An Astounding Contrast—SOUND AND BEAUTY at KKT

By Eleanor Svaton
 
What do we crave from theatre—intellectual or emotional stimulation? 
In Sound and Beauty, both types pervade, though not at once.
 
The two acts of David Henry Hwang’s Sound and Beauty are actually separate stories, though they reflect one another through themes, language, and staging. And yet, the experience of each act in sequence provides an astounding contrast. Act one—The Sound of a Voice—is an eerie, distant, mysterious adult fairy tale influenced and shaped by Asian theatre techniques: a lush, layered soundscape filled with stylized movement, vocals, and scene transitions. Act two—The House of Sleeping Beauties—offers a more realistic, modern take on some of the same themes: aging, beauty, loneliness, and love—a haunting human tale. The first act prepares the way for the second—as a first act should—but not as one would expect. In fact, Director Taurie Kinoshita delivers the subtle one-two punch with the deftness of an attentive lover, so that the effect of the blows doesn’t fully land until the show is long over.
 
The Sound of Intellect
There’s a school of thought, rooted in Asian theatre styles and advocated by the late Bertolt Brecht, that embraces and celebrates the performative quality of theatre, heightening rather than attempting to conceal the fact that a play and the characters on stage are not real, but rather a presentation of a story for the purpose of stimulating an intellectual, before an emotional, response. The presence of emotion, proponents of presentational theatre would argue, stifles or obscures the inclination or ability to think clearly and deeply. Sound avoids emotional distraction through distance, a space in which to question, contemplate, and analyze. 
 
The story is cyclical, presented in nine scenes that alternate between night, morning, evening, dawn, and day. There is a sense of timelessness, as a travelling man, who has stopped by the secluded house of a woman, remains and ostensibly falls in love. The two characters quietly exude secrecy and the very air seems to whisper, or is it the flowers? From their first words to one another, the actors establish a sense of the act’s performative style: their delivery rings unnaturally through the hush of the theatre. Their words take on an ominous quality, almost as if the characters are each narrating their individual parts. In complement, the use of practiced and precise movement and gesture conveys volumes in terms of storytelling.
 
Jennifer Clayton portrays Woman, who calls herself Hanako, while Andrew Lum acts the part of Man. The audience experiences the story along with Man, who never goes offstage. His reason for coming to Hanako’s house in the first place remains unclear until late in the tale, though he is seen grappling through the nights with a kind of demon that might be an externalized product of his inner psyche or some dark magic of Hanako’s, who may be a witch. Such thoughts creep through the theatre and the mind, accented and punctuated into questions and possible answers by Kinoshita’s dramatic choices, such as shadows behind a backlit screen accompanied by startling percussion and the appearance of movement through suspended time.
 
While the staging washes the senses, the story engages the intellect. What does it mean to love? To stay with one person in one place? Is it resignation? Loss of self and freedom? Hanako says, “It takes hundreds of words to describe a single act of caring. With hundreds of acts, words become irrelevant.” Her love sounds simple though it requires constant effort and attention: care. But for Man, submission to this care equals defeat. The final moment of Sound is a dangling, provocative period, marred slightly by over-accentuation.

Denise Aiko Chinen and Dann Seki, as Woman and Yasunari Kawabata, courtesy of Kumu Kahua Theatre

 
The Beauty of Emotion
Western theatre, and Western art in general, historically has had a relatively—though not exclusively—realistic style when compared with its Eastern equivalents. The goal is often for the line between actor and character to dissolve so that they are one in the same. This kind of performance, when done well, can have an intense emotional impact, depending on the nature of the story.
 
Denise Aiko Chinen and Dann Seki, as Woman and Yasunari Kawabata, successfully achieve this seamlessness, which immediately marks the second act as distinctly different from the first. Hwang’s play is based on a real person who actually wrote a “novelette” called House of the Sleeping Beauties, and so realism makes more sense in this act, which is set in Tokyo in 1972 in a kind of chaste brothel where young women sleep through the attentions of old “gentlemen.” The play imagines the scenario that could have led Kawabata to write his story. The idea of “sleeping beauties”—drugged girls from poor families—being stroked by the wrinkled fingers of men old enough to be their grandfathers ought to be infuriating, especially since this is the realistic half of the evening. The proprietor of the House deserves condemnation, and the “guest” and she should both be arrested. On an intellectual level, how can civilized people not be offended? And yet, both characters are extremely sympathetic. This is the power of emotion.
 
Told in four scenes, this slightly longer act enraptures. The strange, disturbing circumstances of the House, of what happens in the back rooms where the beauties sleep, of what will happen to Kawabata, who dreams of his friend (another historical figure) Mishima’s hari-kari, of what will happen to the Woman, who remembers her past without fully revealing it—all these threads form a labyrinth of suspense and dark fascination, the mind reaching, searching, while the actors play the heartstrings like a samisen. Beneath lie the deeper questions of the human condition: What do we see in the dark when sleep eludes? Can the need for human connection ever be truly satisfied? Where do we go to die? 
 
The only distance between Seki and Chinen’s characters and the audience is in the physical space of the theatre. Kinoshita’s opposing choices heighten each act, the first in retrospect, and the second in the moment. At the same time, the first act never leaves the stage, with certain props, costumes, and lines of dialogue marking them as connected. One is the past, but the past and the present are not separate. The future is merely tomorrow’s past. Similarly, the mind and the heart are two parts of the person, and while they may be alternatively engaged, they are never really separate. Finally, the East and the West, the presentational and the representational, the performative and the realistic, the I and the you, are all parts of the same whole, all embody the same desires and losses, and all end in nothing but what stories and memories are left behind.