Horror abates when cast veers from ritualized style

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

•	'Ten Million Reawakenings' 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 7 Yellow Brick Studio; $10; 722-6941

"Ten Million Reawakenings" is a new play adapted by Richard Goodman from a story by Lafcadio Hearn, an English scholar who toured Japan in the 1890s. It's a ghost story centering on a samurai who breaks a promise to his dying wife that he would never marry again. Director Brad Powell and leading actor Eric Nemoto contributed to the script, and the production gets a technical boost from authentic kimonos, dances and ceremonies.

Aside from the Edo-period cultural vignettes, however, as the ghost of the first wife terrorizes her successor, the plot has the features of a third-rate horror flick. If the production stuck with a ritualized style, we might accept the ham-handed horror. Unfortunately, the cast tries to turn the characters into real people and fails in the attempt.

In Act 1, Nemoto plays Shimuzu as a sensitive guy. Shimizu only becomes a lunkhead in Act 2 when he marries again, then leaves his second wife alone within hexing distance of his first wife's grave. Prolonged bickering with his mother also diminishes both characters.

Shaula Voge has the delicate innocence necessary in the second wife, but Dorothy Stamp is too robust to be believable as sickly wife No. 1. Didi Leong plays a crotchety one-note as the carping mother. Bill Carr has only one speech, a vivid one, as a guard who describes an apparition carrying a head freshly torn from its body.

The real interest in "Reawakenings" is in watching Hideko Usami deftly assemble and arrange a traditional kimono and in the precise movements of shrine dancers Akiko Kaji and Jenny Cheung.