SITI Company, the internationally acclaimed ensemble theater co-founded by famed American director Anne Bogart, showcases Yukio Mishima’s mysterious and poetic play “Hanjo” directed by SITI Co-Artistic Director Leon Ingulsrud. “Hanjo”, by provocative Japanese author Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), is a timeless tale of love, loneliness, and betrayal in which a young woman’s endless waiting for her lover transports her into a state of insanity. Ingulsrud’s direction unveils Mishima’s story as a bilingual triptych in which the actors rotate through each character role. This brings Noh Theater’s elegance, expressiveness, and economy together with techniques of contemporary theater, shedding light on identity, gender, language and ultimately the art of acting.

The SITI Company’s production of Yukio Mishima’s Hanjo completely concerns itself with the nuances and understanding of time and, critically, with the experience of time in the theater. Translated and directed by Leon Ingulsrud, the work makes time repeat itself, creates memory, builds revelation into the spectator’s experience. It’s a theater experiment that is remarkably interesting if you have a taste for the stage as a Petri dish, or, perhaps, if you attend the theater as you would visit a museum. The production performs Hanjo, a three-character play, three times with each actor rotating through each character. In the story, a young woman goes mad waiting for her lover, Hanjo, to return to her and is adopted by a lonely painter; when the lover finds her in Tokyo she does not recognize him, says he has a dead face. The story is based on a 14th-century noh play of the same name; it is a very good story, vivid, with good characters and themes of loneliness and regret that resonate through text and performance. Naturally, the embodiment of each actor as each character provides three layers to the characters, three chances to live in one moment, three ways of communicating one idea; …Read more