Not so Authentic Kabuki: An Interview with Brooke O'Harra

Abstract

Not so Authentic KabukiAn Interview with Brooke O'Harra Brooke O'Harra (bio) and Katherine Brewer Ball (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Brooke O'Harra. Photograph by Katherine Endy. I first saw brooke o'harra's work in 2008 with Room for Cream, the hilarious and shame-filled lesbian serial that she directed and co-wrote with the Dyke Division of the Two-headed Calf (founded by o'harra, jess barbagallo, laryssa husiak, and laura berlin stinger). Set in a coffee shop in Sappho, Massachusetts, RFC was a collaborative work that pulled from the queer, feminist, and avant-garde downtown performance crowd. I remember lea robinson and jibz cameron as dirty agro lezzie cops, faye driscoll as a hypersexed vampire with crotchy dance moves, and sacha yanow with her perfectly aligned bangs and giant [End Page 29] circular glasses. Room for Cream felt simultaneously fresh and anachronistic. And while there was a theatrical precedent for the serial theater form—with works by jeff weiss and others—the serial, like a TV program, struck my twenty-something brain as so unusual and delicious. RFC was like a homosexual Cheers, a place where everyone knows your name. But this was the collaborative, broken-down, queer version of Cheers where things rarely, if ever, find resolution.However, the irreverent humor and exposed quick-change styles that characterized Room for Cream were not new for o'harra. In fact, o'harra's production of the 1707 kabuki play Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, written by chikamatsu monzaemon, which o'harra had developed and directed the year before, used similar tactics, only this time they were focused on the traditional Japanese form. Drum featured American actors performing an English translation of the Japanese play. Yet, instead of reproducing the movements and styles of kabuki masters, as is traditional in kabuki, o'harra and the company chose to study and repeat the gestural vocabulary of punk rock masters such as iggy pop, darby crash, nina hagen, and the slits. Accompanied by the music of her Theater of a Two-headed Calf cofounder brendan connelly, o'harra's production maintained the highly dramatic kabuki form even as the English and American punk style yanked on kabuki's structural integrity. Drum premiered in 2007 at HERE Arts Center and won an Obie Award for acting. For the occasion of this interview, I sat down with o'harra to discuss Japanese performing arts, American fantasies of adaptation, and embodied practice. —Katherine Brewer Ball [End Page 30] katherine brewer ball/ You were saying that the reason you like theater is because you like Japanese theater? brooke o'harra/ I played sports before college. I wasn't a theater kid. But I did have the opportunity to study Japanese language and culture at my public high school in Oregon. I continued studying Japanese in college; that's when I was introduced to Japanese theater. I also started studying Western theater around that time and directed a production in college that was deeply influenced by formal structures of Japanese theater. It was an American play by Jules Feiffer called Little Murders. My production had extra performers that functioned like a version of Japanese stagehands [kuroko]. The play was performed like a typical Western dramatic comedy—except these kuroko would enter the stage at emotional or dramatic moments and manipulate the actors to alter the stage picture. They would do things like literally flip the actor completely upside down. The current Broadway play Harry Potter and The Cursed Child actually uses a similar technique for some of their stage magic—but their stagehands are well concealed. So, I had been planning to move to New York City and pursue theater after college, but then I thought, I should go to Japan. So I went to Japan with a job for the Japanese Ministry of Education and studied kyogen and aikido, and joined a butoh company. I also attended kabuki theater and experimental Japanese theater regularly. That was the true beginning of my theater training. In Japan, I was so stimulated by the theater—both the experimental forms and traditional. Before being introduced to Japanese theater (and some experimental...