The annual Under the Radar festival begins this week, presenting more than 30 theater productions for brief runs at different stages all over New York City during January. Now in its 21st season, Under the Radar showcases an incredibly diverse range of innovative, often challenging, sometimes bizarre works created by arts organizations based here and abroad. Among the festival’s initial dozen events are Bellow and Kanjincho, respectively arriving from Ireland and Japan. Both construe national traditions in surprisingly contemporary ways.
★★★☆☆ Bellow
Danny O’Mahony is a renowned accordionist whose nearly 40-year career is dedicated to the preservation of traditional Irish music. The musician is the quietly impressive central figure of Bellow, an oddly pleasurable 80-minute mix of biography, old-school Irish tunes and experimental theater gambits.
Its title connoting the squeezebox workings of the accordions O’Mahony will soulfully play, Bellow is produced by Brokentalkers, a Dublin-based company that develops fresh works. Written by O’Mahony with the company’s artistic co-directors Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan, Bellow opened Thursday at the Irish Arts Center.
Scarcely a chronological account of an artist’s times, Bellow is sparked by an odd couple-type dynamic. A ginger-bearded musician of unmistakable authenticity, O’Mahony is prodded to venture beyond traditional storytelling by Keegan, who assumes the antic character of an excitable avant-garde theater-maker. The men later are joined by Emily Kilkenny Roddy, a dancer who at one point expressively interprets the push-and-pull nature of O’Mahony’s musicianship.
Employing narrative, dance and both traditional and new music, they inventively highlight O’Mahony’s formative years: A harrowing visit as a youngster to Times Square in all of its 1989 awfulness. How he had to hitchhike to win a distant music competition. The way he absorbed musical traditions at the feet of venerable players jamming in a local pub. Episodes are interspersed by vintage tunes and O’Mahony’s unexpectedly poignant talk about his several accordions and their original owners, including a great-uncle.
Not all of Bellow is so cogent, particularly when Roddy dons the mask of a red-headed boy to depict O’Mahony’s exploitation by a seedy manager (Keegan sporting a red cowboy outfit, don’t ask). Similarly complex passages are not easily appreciated, although the production is enriched by highly dramatic lighting from designer Sarah Jane Shiels and especially by a deeply layered sound design and rhythmic electronic music created by Valgeir Sigurðsson.
For all of its advanced, at times arch, mostly diverting theatricality, the sweetest times arise in Bellow when O’Mahony sits in a chair and performs one of those haunting old Irish airs. Wisely, the piece concludes on just such a simple moment.
The extremely stylized historic visuals of Japan’s traditional kabuki theater are scarcely to be noted in Kanjincho, a new, hot contemporary adaptation of a very old drama based upon a 12th century tale. Performed in Japanese with English supertitles on a pair of screens perched above the 80-minute proceedings, Kanjincho is a sharp study in deception and loyalty during a dangerous “time of chaos” when refugees, notable people or not, are fleeing their country.
Set amid a mountain pass, the story essentially sees a nobleman and his retinue, disguised as priests, try to smooth talk their way past the border guards at a checkpoint. What develops is an increasingly and wonderfully intense cat-and-mouse faceoff between the two leaders of the opposing forces.
Reshaped into colloquial Japanese by Yuichi Kinoshita, founder of the Kinoshita Kabuki theater company from Kyoto that makes its North American debut with this taut production at Japan Society, the drama is strikingly staged by director-designer Kunio Sugihara across a raised walkway stage that divides the audience. Clad in black athletic gear, a young, seven-member ensemble registers ever-changing emotion, at times fiercely, usually elegantly, even comically, while a cool, contained Ryotaro Sakaguchi quizzes the shaggy, canny and often droll Lee V on priestly protocol. Keep an eye on Noemi Takayama as a person of interest who gracefully lurks beneath a big hat. Brief action sequences look kinetic. The pauses seem profound. The climax proves riveting. The poignant aftermath involves a drunken picnic with goofy dancing and an ironic “It’s a Small World After All.”
The director’s apt deployment of a fine dramatic and atmospheric sound design along with the slashing white blades and beams of lighting crisscrossing the action (credited to three designers) provide excellent support for Kinoshita Kabuki’s swift, remarkably modern, remarkably compelling production of Kanjincho.
