Word: kawarasaki
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Japan's Kabuki or People's Theater is nowhere near as stuffy as the ancient and stylized No drama, but in 300 years, even the Kabuki has become a bit hidebound. Back in 1931, Japan's top Kabuki player, jut-jawed Actor Chojuro Kawarasaki, decided to liberate...
Like many a Broadway and Hollywood contemporary, Actor Kawarasaki had a tickling Marxian social conscience. He organized a new Kabuki troupe called the Zenshinza (Forward-Looking Theater), set up shop in a sleek, modern playhouse outside Tokyo, defied tradition by hiring women actors to play female parts and began mixing Western dramas with the Japanese classics. When V-J brought democracy officially to Japan, Democrat Kawarasaki was ready with a full-fledged production of John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln (TIME...
SCAP officials beamed in approval and Actor Kawarasaki followed this triumph with Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Both were popular successes and financial flops. What with high taxes and high admission prices, complained Kawarasaki, "we still have to put on plays which, flatter the people who come...
Last week Kawarasaki had a new audience to flatter. In the presence of fire-eating Party Secretary Kyuichi Tokuda (who presumably had promised to foot the bills), Kawarasaki and 71 Zenshinza players joined the Communist Party. "After all," explained the ex-emancipator, "Lincolnism and Marxism are not exactly the same, but they have many similarities...
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