Hold on to your seats: We're going back to the essence of theater -- entertainment. "The Kyogen of Errors," directed by and starring 36-year-old Mansai Nomura, is a fitting way to celebrate his five-year appointment as artistic director of the Setagaya Public Theater (SEPT), which was announced two weeks ago.
Kyogen, a comedy style that originated in the Muromachi Period (1392-1573), is in Nomura's blood -- he is the son of one of kyogen's leading lights, Mansaku Nomura, and a grandson of its late living national treasure, Manzo Nomura. This unusual play is, as the name suggests, a kyogen version of "The Comedy of Errors," one of Shakespeare's early side-splitters.
It's a promising combination. "The Comedy of Errors" follows the mistaken-identity adventures of two sets of male identical twins, none of whom knows he has a twin, and features the kind of broad humor also found in kyogen. Before the eventual emotional reunion of the four, Shakespeare puts the two master-and-servant pairs through social and familial chaos. In the process, he imbues even this farcical scenario with a weighty subtext: If we treated everyone as family, would we behave the way we do?