For a display wherein the vast majority of actors spend maximum in their time dressed in simplest mawashi, Sumo is very smartly dressed. Directed by way of Ralph B. Peña, Lisa Sanaye Dring’s exploration of Japan’s nationwide game — additionally very a lot an artwork shape and a sacred Shinto ritual — lands on the Public Theater in a co-production with Ma-Yi Theater Corporate after an preliminary West Coast run at L. a. Jolla Playhouse in 2023, and it seems to be and sounds commensurately polished. Aesthetically, that is the results of many devoted arms honing a extremely specialised piece over the years: Whether or not it’s the bodily dynamism and element equipped by way of sumo marketing consultant James Yaegashi and his co-fight director Chelsea Tempo, or the pulse-raising taiko drumming carried out reside by way of Shih-Wei Wu (who additionally wrote the display’s taiko ranking), or the plush projections by way of Hana S. Kim — which spread like historical watercolors around the sliding again partitions and the spherical sumo-ring ground of Wilson Chin’s set — the sensory panorama of Sumo is thoroughly and caringly crafted, wealthy with each real-world details and non secular heft. Wrapped in any such garment, Dring’s play itself can once in a while really feel somewhat like a junior wrestler making an attempt to put on a tsuna, the ceremonial 30-pound belt awarded to sumo wrestlers after they achieve yokozuna, the game’s best rank. It’s now not that the writing lacks muscle or ambition, nevertheless it’s additionally obviously nonetheless rising, and its dips into flatness or method are periodically outshone by way of the specifics of its dwelling environment.
In the case of tale construction, there’s greater than just a little Joseph Campbell — by the use of George Lucas — embedded in Dring’s script. Her hero is Akio (Scott Keiji Takeda), a tender wrestler who’s simply been approved right into a sumo heya, or solid, in recent Tokyo by way of its grasp, the oyakata. Oyakata are historically retired wrestlers who’ve moved into the placement of coaches and running shoes, although, as Dring’s characters indicate, many go away the real coaching to their deputies whilst they reside the ritzier managerial lifetime of wining, eating, and drafting potential winners. “When oyakata is long past — which is all the time — ōzeki is the boss,” says So (Michael Hisamoto), a candy dreamer who’s simplest a few ranks above Akio. Ōzeki denotes a king of the hill, just one rank under the highest. Performed with gruff impenetrability and a thinly veiled sadistic streak by way of David Shih, this giant canine’s identify is Mitsuo, however nobody makes use of names within the heya — simplest ranks. “In sumo,” we’re advised by way of a trio of narrating Shinto monks (performed with mischievous shape-shifting power by way of Kris Bona, Paco Tolson, and Viet Vo), “rank is the whole thing.” Every so often superbly illustrative, Kim’s projections also are sensible instructing aids: We be told sumo’s rating device pronto, along side quite a few different useful vocabulary (the wrestlers are rikishi; a event is a honbasho).
Akio — a prickly, bold child with a brief backstory that incorporates being deserted by way of his mom — goals of taking pictures up during the ratings to repute and glory. “I’m now not right here to be enlightened,” he taunts at So. As an alternative, he longs for victories within the ring, sponsorships from Nintendo and Nissan, and — forbidden all over the wrestlers’ religiously enmeshed coaching however in some way to be had to the highest canine, along side each different temptation — ladies. He right away chafes on the cleansing, fetching, and wearing tasks assigned to him, and he’s as canny as he’s surly. He’s were given an eye fixed for technique, for the weaknesses in possible warring parties. “Everybody’s were given a cushy spot,” Mitsuo tells him with a winner’s complacency, however Akio shoots again, “Yours is the shoulder. The suitable one. Everybody thinks it’s the knee.” This child is much less a Luke Skywalker than an Anakin: He’s proficient, impatient, and hungry for energy — simply looking ahead to the Darkish Facet.
Possibly for this reason it may well incessantly really feel tricky to forge a powerful emotional funding in Sumo. As within the Megastar Wars prequels, we’re now not following a once in a while whiny however in the long run fascinating, open, and brave younger hero — as an alternative, we’ve were given an all the time whiny, defensive, closed-off, headed-for-a-fall roughly man on our arms. Every so often, Dring pulls again and tries to present Akio a judgment of right and wrong: He feels for an open-minded, good-natured wrestler named Shinta (Earl T. Kim), who’s disgraced all over a event and due to this fact pushed aside from the heya, so we all know he’s now not all unhealthy. However it’s a difficult activity to craft a protagonist like Akio — who’s such a lot of portions unlikability, each his ascent and downfall really easy to are expecting — and stay us now not such a lot sympathetic as merely . Being attentive to him grumble about having to wash or protest that he’s able to combat can simplest pressure such a lot of scenes. And, on the identical time, the play itself is making an attempt to straddle two horses and wobbling within the procedure: It might’t rather work out whether or not it desires Akio’s complaining to be the signifier of his immaturity — his loss of humility and put out of your mind for the type of non secular knowledge that So provides when he says, “Earlier than enlightenment, chop picket, raise water. After enlightenment, chop picket, raise water” — or whether or not it desires Akio to be a tender reformer, the voice of a brand new and no more abusive technique to an artwork shape wherein the traditional techniques can also be each exquisitely profound and, from a contemporary point of view, discriminatory and vicious.
I feel Dring aspires to the latter. “I ask,” she writes in her playwright’s observe, “that the mythology which has created one thing as wonderful as sumo — ruled by way of essentially the most tough goddesses, exclusionary to such a lot of, and basic to shaping the awareness of my ancestors — make area for a brand new sacred creativeness. And I ask that our degree make area for a brand new roughly hero.” In conventional, skilled sumo, because it’s nonetheless practiced in Japan, ladies are barred from the game solely. In diving into each its formative myths and its vexed human practices, Dring appears to be status aspect by way of aspect along with her personal protagonist: In combination, they’re looking to carve out that new area she describes. But the form of Akio’s personality and his overfamiliar arc — particularly his repetitive interactions with the menacing tempter Mitsuo — don’t give you the radical, paradigm-shifting power Sumo is striving for.
Extra compelling is the play’s primary subplot, which follows the connection between Fumio (Pink Concepción), a middle-ranking wrestler on the heya, and Ren (a majestic Ahmad Kamal), the toughest employee within the solid, best within the ratings beneath Mitsuo and an infinitely extra humane soul. A few of Dring’s greatest paintings occurs in her exploration of the affection between those two males — secretly romantic in nature — and of the broader, platonic but intensely bodily love shared by way of all of the rikishi. As an implicit birthday celebration of giant our bodies and of various, deeply feeling masculinities, Sumo is at its most lovely. A scene wherein Akio, too guarded and greedy to enroll in in, observes as his comrades cave in into drunken karaoke after a a success honbasho offers the play an actual jolt towards that area of risk imagined by way of its writer — an area the place human love and human pleasure are as sacred as any historical ritual, the place the frame isn’t just a shrine to outdated gods however a house to be totally inhabited and shared, with out disgrace, on earth.
Sumo is on the Public Theater thru March 30.
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