Classic film “Rashomon” is coming to the stage.
Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film “Rashomon,” about a priest trying to uncover the truth about a samurai’s murder despite conflicting testimonies (from the samurai’s wife, a woodcutter, a bandit and the samurai’s ghost) has achieved such classic status since its release that its oneword title has become shorthand for the concept of truth being in the eye of the beholder.
“The problem is, the ‘Rashomon effect’ people talk about, meaning that we can see the same events and come away with very different realities, is a slight misnomer,” said Michael Moran, founder and co-artistic director of Ubuntu Theater Project. The 5-yearold Oakland company, known for its incisive, fresh takes on classic dramas, presents the world premiere of an adaptation of “Rashomon” by Philip Kan Gotanda (“The Wash,” “I Dream of Cheng and Eng”) as the final production of its 2017 season. It opens Friday, Aug. 25, and runs through Sept. 17.
“It’s worth remembering that in the film, people don’t just have different perspectives. Everybody is actually lying a bit to save face, because the truth is more humiliating,” said Moran. “Facts themselves are contested. No one can agree on the truth, as opposed to what they feel certain is their individual ‘truth’ — and flat-out lies are commonplace.”
Moran, 30, a Richmond native, knew how familiar this would sound to anyone even remotely following the news, and drama, spilling out of Washington these days. “It’s not a stretch to see the connection to this topsy-turvy world we’re now in,” he said.
Unlike most theater productions, which begin with a director investigating a script and finding contemporary resonance, Moran said that in this case the process worked in reverse.
“The election was ramping up, then ‘fake news’ came up and the newest word in the dictionary was something like ‘post-truth.’ I kept racking my brain, ‘What is a story or allegory that can speak to what is going on?’ Then ‘Rashomon’ came to mind. I presented Philip with the idea and we just ran with it.”
“I had toyed with the idea
(of adapting ‘Rashomon’) before, and actually was approached by ACT about it years ago, but ended up writing ‘After the War’ instead (for ACT’s 40th anniversary season in 2007),” said Gotanda by phone from his Berkeley home.
The 65-year-old playwright, a major influence for the last four decades on American drama (as well as a respected indie filmmaker), has since 2014 also been a full-time theater professor at UC Berkeley.
“At first I thought I have so many outside commitments, and I have to prepare for school, but there’s something about Michael’s vision and Ubuntu that convinced me I should just do it,” Gotanda said. “Michael is such a smart, young theater mind and, I believe, an important person in terms of where American theater is going.”
When he and Moran first met last year, Gotanda said, “We started talking, not about ‘Rashomon,’ but just about the world, about the present state of the country and why it was so difficult for America, and progressives in particular, to understand how we arrived here. Our ‘Rashomon’ was to be a continuation of these conversations.”
The play doesn’t make overt reference to Trump “because we wanted this to feel more poetic, allegorical,” said Gotanda, “but you’ll know it’s a direct response to our time.”
The new adaptation is based on the source material Kurosawa used for his landmark film: two short stories, “In a Grove” and “Rashomon,” by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927).
“I’ve always been a big fan of Kurosawa, but also very interested in Akutagawa, who’s not really well-known,” said Gotanda. “He had a short meteoric rise as a master of the short-story form, was quite influential in Japan, but committed suicide” at age 35.
In January, Gotanda and Moran started meeting every several weeks, “and then I’d go off and write,” Gotanda said. “Actors get draft pages at rehearsal and tell me what they think right away.”
The fast-paced, nimble revision process with a shoestring company like Ubuntu “harkens back to my earliest experiences working with small companies like Asian American Theater Company,” which started Gotanda’s career in the 1970s. “They literally were storefronts with leaky roofs, and whatever you wrote went up. You think on your feet, you really rely on the actors. It’s a small group flying by the seat of its pants financially, and I find that fun.”
Ubuntu’s spare, stylized “Rashomon” introduces the “meta point of view,” said Gotanda, by having Akutagawa appear as a character onstage, questioning the relevance of his own storytelling as he’s writing.
“So you walk into the theater and see him typing on a typewriter, and if we do it right, there are thousands of pieces of paper all over the space, as if we’re in this purgatory of Akutagawa trying to capture the right reflection of the post-truth age right now,” said Moran.
“It’s a maddening, house-of-mirrors project, but incredibly worthwhile because Akutagawa plays with the same question tormenting us: ‘How does ‘Rashomon’ speak to our moment right now?’ ”