The mythological and Shinto roots of sumo wrestling, along with the cultural, aesthetic, social and perhaps most of all, the rigorous mental and physical aspects regarding Japan’s national sport and its professional players, are dramatized to varying degrees in SUMO, a new play by Lisa Sanaye Dring.
Opening Wednesday in its New York premiere at the Public Theater, SUMO is produced by the combined forces of the Ma-Yi Theater Company and the Public Theater along with La Jolla Playhouse, where the work first was staged in 2023. It is obvious much care has gone into executing the production details necessary to help acquaint audiences with a professional sport that’s likely unfamiliar to most Americans. Still, while watching the fairly predictable SUMO unfold over two acts, you might wish the playwright had devised a better story—or a fresher approach—to illuminate the game’s unique allure, practices and subtleties.
Before the main narrative gets started, individuals traditionally garbed as Shinto priests give the audience a hasty rundown on the basic rules of sumo matches, note how wrestlers represent gods once battling for ownership of Japan, and explain a few details of a wrestler’s traditional rituals, such as those slow-motion foot stomps meant to symbolize cleansing the earth of bad spirits.
Then the story of SUMO concentrates upon Akio (Scott Keiji Takeda), an ambitious 18 year-old novice who doggedly wrestles his way upwards in the rankings, even as he meets and overcomes humiliation, pain, emotional stress, and challenges specific to the game. Key to his eventual triumph is Akio’s prickly relationship with an unwilling mentor Mitsuo (David Shih), a stern veteran of their communal stable of wrestlers who someday he must master in the ring. Along the way, a series of brief sumo matches lead to a final confrontation.
Expect for the most part a straightforward, terribly familiar scenario often utilized for sagas about other kinds of sports, dressed out here in the traditional mawashi loincloth belts, formal rituals and jargon of sumo, which by the way is pronounced su-MO. Amid these usual tropes about ambition, motivation and rivalries, the author provides a fleeting homosexual subplot that’s delicately rendered in its composition and performances. Other shady though intriguing sidelights on the sport’s sponsors, fandom and dietary issues flicker but otherwise fade away.
The Public’s stadium-like Anspacher space, where 275 seats on three sides sharply angle down towards the stage, is the perfect spot for the central ring required for the wrestling sequences. Projections by Hana S. Kim, sometimes showing classical Japanese images, other times hard modern print, travel across the stage deck and a rear wall where doors slide open to blast out blinding rock and roll-style lighting for the tournaments. The visual and aural elements expertly designed by Paul Whitaker (lighting), Wilson Chin (scenic), Mariko Ohigashi (costume) and Fabian Obispo (sound/music) fluently serve the play’s varying needs to be expansive or intimate, mythical or natural. Providing authenticity and further drama to this occasion is composer-performer Shih-Wei-Wu, a striking figure who stands high above the action and pounds out exciting Taiko drum rhythms.
These intricate design components are coordinated strategically by Ralph B. Peña, Ma-Yi Theater’s artistic director, whose sensitive staging of SUMO maintains focus on the human side of Dring’s unexpectedly somber story as she raises issues such as masculinity and power among athletes grappling with extremely physical circumstances. Dring’s laconic dialogue sounds natural through the confident, personable performances by a nine-member ensemble. Of course, most of the actors also participate in a series of demanding sumo wrestling bouts that sure appear like the real thing in the brawny fights co-directed by James Yaegashi and Chelsea Pace.
As the story heads into its seemingly inevitable conclusion, the playwright and director, backed by their designers, summon up the spiritual gods of sumo in an attempt to ratchet earthly matters into a higher power of significance. Yet despite the crash course in mythology and sumo wrestling that began the play—or perhaps because such an information overload is hard to recall, let alone appreciate, more than two hours later—the climactic scene proves to be something of a fizzle. An ambitious work, SUMO reaches for greater consequence beyond the ring and if the drama does not satisfyingly achieve its goals, at least the attempt is honorable and the production is first rate.
Sumo opened March 5, 2025, at the Public Theater and runs through March 30. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
