Noh words

She-Who-Loves speaks volumes

By Robert von Stein Redick

She-Who-Loves shows through January 14 at figures of Speech Theatre in Freeport, (207) 865-6355.

MULTI-CULTI: She-Who-Loves combines noh theater and bunraku puppetry in the telling of a Comanche legend (Carol Farrell pictured).

Remember E.F. Schumacher? The father of appropriate technology, the architect of an “economics as if people mattered”? His manifesto still floats about the least-visited part of your local library; his maxim still resides, like a dormant genetic instruction, in our common spiritual blood banks. Yet every now and then recessive becomes dominant, and we meet with a perfect reminder that small can indeed be beautiful.

Maine theater is rife with examples: frugal productions frequently outshine lavish ones; intimate character studies often pack the kind of punch that 30-actor extravaganzas reach for in vain. And occasionally, sheltered from marketplace winds, there comes along something totally new, unexpected, and blooming with life.

Did I say totally new? It’s an odd descriptor for She-Who-Loves, a production which brings elements of some of the world’s oldest dramatic forms to the telling of a Comanche legend. But in its fusion of Japanese noh theater and bunraku puppetry, Indonesian shadow-drama and American sensibilities, this Figures of Speech Theatre premiere is a wholly original multicultural artifact.

Small, however, it certainly is: the nonprofit Figures of Speech is almost exclusively a touring company, and their small barn-cum-theater seats a modest 32. But there was nothing makeshift about the accoutrements in the Saturday performance I attended. She-Who-Loves begins with a haunting overture (Carl Dimow’s flute and Andrea Goodman’s wordless song) as the audience considers a table draped in a veil, spot-lit in the darkened room. After several minutes of music, a short-haired woman in black (Carol Farrell) takes the stage and slowly folds the veil, revealing a raised sandbox. Over 10 full minutes we watch her hands at play in the sand, first drawing hypnotic patterns, then discovering the buried constituents of the town — a hut, a horse, a dog — and arranging them with care. The music becomes anguished, Goodman’s notes bend disturbingly; and Farrell slowly, methodically sinks her town back into the sand, until every trace is obliterated.

Those hands continue their discoveries as Goodman chants the story. In keeping with noh and bunraku traditions — which the play’s originators, John and Carol Farrell, studied for six months last year in Japan — the story is neither complex nor presented in the standard suspense/escalation/revelation sequence we are trained to expect. In fact, the legend, beginning to end, appears in the program. A village is dying of drought. Among the survivors is a young girl whose parents have succumbed already, leaving her only a cherished doll made of buckskin and blue-jay feathers and bone. When the village shaman undertakes a sacred dance in search of answers for the suffering people, the spirits inform him that only a sacrifice will break the drought: a burnt offering of the people’s “most cherished possession.” No one but the young girl, however, is ready to take the spirits at their word.

Such anti-dramatic foreknowledge is basic to noh, the entire modern repertory of which amounts to some 230 plays. The word itself means “talent” or “skill”; hence the noh experience is not about surprise but about the appreciation of the finer points of technique — the fidelity of this actor’s fan-holding pose, or that one’s suriashi glide-step.

But while She-Who-Loves borrows from the form’s methods and philosophy, it is not by any means classical noh. Surprise here takes many forms, from comic interludes with flickering, bickering shadow-beings to the shocking apparition of the girl’s mother, a three-foot-tall ghost-puppet, whose white robe drifts over the sandy waste that was her home.

These bunraku-style wooden puppets, carved by John Farrell and controlled in full view by his partner Carol, are chief among the evening’s many sensory wonders, which also include “twinnings” of the puppets by masked and costumed actors, and some of the most creative use of lighting I’ve ever seen. In another nod to Japanese tradition, neither actors nor puppets are granted many words. The emphasis is on conveying theme and emotion through precise movements, and the results are a vindication of the ancient ways. No words could add to the emotion when the fragile ghost-mother pulls away her sleeping daughter’s blanket in order to lay her face against the child’s feet, nor when the wind finally rips the clinging spirit away.

Image and music, gesture and restraint: these are the vehicles She-Who-Loves entrusts to convey its theme of putting community before self. The latter, it reminds us, cannot survive: one of Goodman’s chants intones, “Like thistledown, we can only let go.” But the community can survive, and it is far from coincidental that the Farrells’ third-grade daughter Delia, herself Native American, wears the mask of the young girl.

Sadly, you might have to offer something of a ritual sacrifice yourself in order to see She-Who-Loves. Although there is talk of an extra weekend in February, the scheduled run has already sold out, and the specifics of the tour have yet to be determined. Don’t let that stop you from inquiring, however. As the girl of the legend discovers after putting her doll to the flames, even ashes contain a residue of hope.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.