Japan Society Presents DUKE BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE As Part of Under the Radar 2025

Japan Society will present the North American premiere of this new production of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, written by revolutionary Japanese angura (underground) theater artist and multi-hyphenate Shuji Terayama, now re-envisioned by illustrious experimental theater director Kim Sujin and performed by the all-female avant-garde ensemble Project Nyx.  As part of Under the Radar 2025, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle will have four performances only, Wednesday, January 15 – Saturday, January 18 at Japan Society (333 East 47th Street).  

This production is presented by Japan Society in partnership with Under the Radar, America’s premier experimental performance festival, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025.  Performed in Japanese with English supertitles.  Performance runtime is 135 minutes.

In this new take on Shuji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the play is given an entrancing and nightmarish Harajuku burlesque makeover by director Kim Sujin.  Performed by a 30-member company that includes the all-female ensemble Project Nyx, the Gothic-Lolita cabaret music duo Kokusyoku Sumire and the award-winning magician Syun Shibuya, this stage show further twists Terayama’s aggressively subversive play into a macabre, magic-infused Lolita fashion spectacle saturated with dark magic tricks, fiddlers and accordion players, aerial dance and more.

Throughout his career, Shuji Terayama, a legendary founding figure of Japan’s raucous avant-garde angura theater movement in the 1960s and ’70s, was repeatedly drawn to the French gothic horror Le Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard), a magic-infused folktale about a nobleman who murders his six wives. Terayama’s obsession with the story of Bluebeard’s seventh wife and the mysterious room in Bluebeard’s castle that she is forbidden to enter culminated in this late-career magnum opus script, a twisting game of cat-and-mouse that asks the question – on the theater stage, where magic and the mundane and fantasy and reality freely mix, can anyone truly determine what is truth, and what is a lie? Shuji Terayama wrote Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, nominally drawing from Bela Bartók’s famous operatic version of the French legend, and directed it for his company, Tenjo Sajiki, in 1979 at the Seibu Theater in Shibuya, Tokyo.  The premiere production was titled Duke Bluebeard’s Castle – from Bartók, and was billed by the company as a work full of “fashion, magic, evil, and eroticism.”  

Set in the backstage of a theater in Japan, the play begins with the arrival of a character, The Girl Set to Play the Seventh Wife, as a theater troupe prepares to perform a play called Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Determined to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of her missing stagehand brother, she becomes trapped in the twists and turns of the script, which weaves metaphysical layers of the Gothic horror over top of the play, drawing into question the very nature of theater itself. 

Coinciding with the performances January 15-18, rarely seen artifacts of Terayama scripts, letters, photos and other items from the La MaMa Archive will be displayed in Japan Society’s foyer.  All items are collected from presentations of Terayama’s work at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, including La Marie-Vision, directed by Terayama himself and performed by American actors in 1970; and Directions to Servants, by Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki company in 1980.  

Ticketholders for performances on Thursday – Saturday will also receive complimentary, same-day admission for one person to Bunraku Backstage, on view at Japan Society Gallery through January 19, 2025.  To view the exhibition please show ticket/receipt to the Welcome Desk for free admission before the performance. PLEASE NOTE: This exhibit will not be available to the public on Wednesday, January 15.

 

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