Amon Miyamoto's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion"
Based on the novel by Yukio Mishima, this production was staged ingeniously at the Rose Theater on Thursday when I saw it, but it left me cold. It was too easy to dismiss Mizoguchi's despair as adolescent angst, his obsession with the Golden Pavilion as a son's unconsolable grief for his dead father. When he set fire to the Temple, his motive was not complex but obscure. When he repeated "I want to live" at the end of the play, one was tempted to retort, "Why don't you?" Some of the problem lay with the actor, Go Morita, a member of a popular Japanese boy band called V6, who did not go beyond surface gesture. Some of it lay, however, in the rather simplistic depiction of the adults. The loving father. The scolding mother. The hypocritical Master. The jealous Deacon. None of them showed any sign of struggling with Mizoguchi's despair, in their youth or adulthood, and so the despair seemed very much a part of being young, Mizoguchi with his stutter, ...