Cry From The City Of Virgins, A

Even though there seem to be many outward differences, experimental theater in Japan coming out of the turbulent 1960s had a trajectory similar to that in the West. "Underground" playwright Juro Kara's seminal Cry of Virgins, in 1969, capped a decade of ferment in society and the arts. Here presented in its US premiere, this drama cum musical has passed through several revisions, the latest in 1993 for the Shinjuku Ryozanpaku Theater Company, which made its American debut with these performances at Japan Society. Surgeons accidentally discover a clump of hair -- the remains of a missing sister Yukiko -- inside anesthetized Taguchi (a sympathetic Sho Hara). Taguchi's spirit decides to find her, presently a worker/love prisoner of Dr. Franke (appropriately sinister Su Jin Kim) in the Glass Tower of Otena. Yukiko (Yuka Kondo) is slowly turning into glass (that is, becoming immortal) herself, and only when Taguchi proffers two of his severed fingers is she able to reverse the process. Thus salvaged, she returns with him to the operating room and exits his body to search for a more mundane lover.

At regular intervals in the tale Kara's episodic treatment interjects a zany hippie troupe replete with sunglasses and all manner of costumes (Oriana Merullo) to serenade the audience. Thousands of glass marbles rain onto the stage and spill into the pit in the unforgettable finale. Although some of the images like Yukiko's glass vagina or blood spurting from Taguchi's mutilated hand are jarring or even grisly by Western standards, these are balanced by others like a colorful giant fishhead, out of which Yukiko extracts delicacies that stimulate her to return to the land of lost dreams (her memories of the mortal realm) to eat yellow tail.

Su Jin Kim's direction presents the characters as fraught with emotions, but he only skirts their psychological dimension. With modernistic set by Satoshi Otsuka and superb lighting by Tsuguo Izumi, this striking production of Kara's fantastic but amoral tale seems ripe to become a camp extravaganza that should have a long life.