East Meets West Onstage

In "Iago's Plot," a Japanese-inflected adaptation of Shakespeare's "Othello," graduate students in Towson State University's theater program have replaced Elizabethan couplets with haiku and Kabuki verse.

The student actors tell the story of intrigue and betrayal in a Japanese-style singsong alien to most American ears. Their voices soar, swoop and dip. Characters rotate their hands and arms, using their scarves to punctuate the sentiment of their dialogue. At the side of the stage, members of an anonymous chorus strike blocks of wood with thick sticks, accentuating spoken words.

Tomorrow, students in the graduate program will fly to Cairo, Egypt, to become one of three American entries in an international drama festival -- and the lone student troupe to perform there.

"Some of the theater schools are as much about training for film and TV as the stage," said Juanita Rockwell, coordinator of Towson's year-old master of fine arts program in theater. "Towson's program is very much geared toward artists taking risks."

"We're moving away from a career in theater and moving toward a life in theater," Ms. Rockwell said. "It's a difference from thinking you'll eventually get your own TV show."

This would appear to be a turnaround for a campus where the undergraduate alumni in theater include Charles S. Dutton, John Glover and Dwight Shultz -- all successful stage actors who made their way to Hollywood.

For the Towson graduate students in theater, what they have encountered in the past year is different from any previous production in which they have participated. Their voices, their movements and even their centers of gravity have been studied and artificially altered during their performances.

Typical drama or theater programs tend to segregate students into separate programs focusing on each of the components of a production -- acting, directing and set design, for example. The first class of Towson theater students plotted all aspects of the production, drawing on traditions of Balinese dance, European Carnivale and Japanese theater.

Director Shozo Sato, designated a Zen master in Japan, helped to forge a marriage of Western drama with Japanese theater in "Iago's Plot." Only small excerpts of Shakespeare's own words survive. Motion and expression take on added importance.

"In [Western] theater, I don't think there's only one way you can pick up a glass of water," said Leslie Baker, a second-year student who played Emilia, Desdemona's servant. "With Shozo, every action is specifically defined. All of my movement was choreographed."

In Western speech, Mr. Sato said, people tend to gesture as they speak. That is not true in the Japanese culture, requiring some unlearning for the student actors, he said.

Assistant director Rob Clingan, a second-year student in the Towson master of fine arts program, offers the example of the phrase "there is the chair." Americans probably would point as

they said "chair" to indicate where the chair was. In the Japanese tradition, one would speak then point, an effect that heightens the impact of the sentence, Mr. Clingan said.

The script of the play was crafted by the students from the Shakespearean tale in which the proud warrior Othello is betrayed by the trust he places in his aide, Iago. In the original, Othello allows the machinations of his manservant, Iago, to convince him that his wife has been unfaithful. In a fit of fury, Othello kills his wife, Desdemona, then kills himself once he realizes what he has done.

In "Iago's Plot," Desdemona takes her own life and Othello and Iago are cursed to live with the knowledge of the misery they have caused. That is an outgrowth of Mr. Sato's Buddhist principles, in which destiny plays as much a part as any character on stage.

As in the Japanese tradition, some lines are repeated -- immediately and much later in the script.

Mr. Sato not only sought to graft East onto West, but he also tried to reconcile Kabuki and No theater traditions in his students' creation.

No and Kabuki traditions are generally at odds. No relies on very spare production values -- monotone voices, no makeup, minimalist sets and costumes -- to remove all "unnecessary" elements that distract from the central truth, Mr. Sato said. Hence the lack of scenery or stage sets in "Iago's Plot."

Kabuki productions exaggerate everything, leading to the use of all ranges of the voice and to caricatured faces painted in brightly colored makeup.

"We dip the essence of the Shakespeare plot into Kabuki, and then dip that into No," Mr. Sato said. "It's almost like making a fancy candle by dipping it into many different colors, one after the other."

That's exactly the point of the program, Ms. Rockwell said.

In an age when government funding of theater is likely to decline, threatening strong regional groups, actors need to learn how to create their own approach to drama, she said.

"We're not espousing the one and true way," Ms. Rockwell said.