A story with a compelling central situation is a magnet to any form of drama. In the theatre or cinema, colorful characters can emote and articulate their way through scenes of violent tension or unimpeachable rhetoric, but the audience is never deeply concerned or held unless the basic architecture of the plot has cohesion, focus and point. The over-all gesture of a good play or film can usually be recounted on a single page of script.
The original short story of Rashomon was written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, an avante-garde Japanese writer who produced his work during the first quarter of the century. He was a detached and elusive man who wrote more than one hundred evocative and haunting short stories. He was considered a neurotic and paradoxical character by his contemporaries, and he committed suicide at the age of thirty-five. As is well known, his stories Rashomon and In a Grove were adapted for the screen, and a magnificent Japanese picture was the result; it initiated a strong interest in Japanese films, which is increasing every year.
I saw and enjoyed this film enormously, and when I first heard that Fay and Michael Kanin had adapted the stories into play form, I was skeptical. I remembered the film too well. However, when I read their script I realized that they had used the central situation of the stories and had retold them in terms that were essentially theatrical. Naturally the long, silent, visual images of action, of forests and skies, of men running through woods, and so on, wre absent from the playscript. In the place of those visual-action shots, the Kanins had contributed dialogue, detailed characterization and a fluid sense of what the theatre itself, exclusively, can offer in terms of tension, dialogue, pantomime and pictorial effect.
Their script called for a large, intricate production, and the casting problems were considerable. Three of the leading actors have to portray four different versions of their characters. Those versions are at variance with one another and they are recounted in a police court, and are acted out by the cast as they are being described. In order to assemble what we consider the proper elements for the production of the play, we waited for nearly two years and now, as I write these lines, at last we are in what I think is known as "active preparation" for a Broadway opening.
It is our hope that the constituent elements of the play will evoke the Orient without in any way attempting the conventions of the Japanese theatre. Akutagawa's story itself has nothing in common with the style and method of Japanese theatre productions. Rashomon is a Western play in a Japanese setting. In the case of Rashoman, unlike the other two productions with an Oriental slant that have been presented on Broadway this season, the fact that the characters are Oriental has no significance in the story itself. There is no meeting of East and West. There is no comment on the juxtaposition of cultures or races. In fact, the characters in Rashomon are totally unaware that they are Oriental for the simple reason that they are living amongst their own race and give no thought to any other. It is for this reason that it would be pointless to call on Oriental actors to portray the parts. We do not necessarily expect to see Greek actors on Broadway in Medea, or French actors in The Waltz of the Toreadors. In my opinion, it is only when you relate one nationality to another in a play or a film that you may need to cast actors with a view to their actual race. If this were not so, we should seldom see plays set in countries other than our own. I have never seen a Danish Hamlet, but in The World of Suzie Wong, when a young American finds that he is enamoured of a Chinese dance hostess, it was obviously a happy thought to cast the enchanting France Nuyen in the part.
The music for Rashomon, by Laurence Rosenthal, will have Oriental overtones and will be partially orchestrated for ancient Oriental instruments. On the other hand, the modality of the score will be largely Western, as the emotional impact must be immediately translatable to Western ears.
The setting for Oliver Messel is a composite one, and its chief feature is that pitfall for scenic designers, a forest. I think it would be fair to say that there is nothing more difficult to suggest in terms of decor in the theatre than a wood. In the eighteenth century there was no problem as society audiences of that period delighted in the formal anrtificiality of the painted cloth. Furthermore, the placid equilibrium of a formal garden was more often the background for the convolutions of their plots, revolving as they most often did around the loquacious intricacies of the upper-class dalliance. Tailored bushes painted in false perspective on a back cloth satisfied what little need they had for the smell of the open air in the theatre. In the nineteenth century, a cumbersome and aesthetically nasty realism was all the rage, and forests with twisted canvas roots and grass carpets were splattered across the stage, while great sails of netting with sewn-in leaves floated from the flies. The climax of that tasteless so-called realism was reached by Sir Beerbohn Tree at this Majesty's Theatre in London when he presented, to the delight of the audience, a glade in which live rabbits scampered around.
Today's taste in theatre design is more pure and more sophisticated. The wood, the heath and the garden are still a problem. We now even find it difficult to accept the clean, hard, scrubbed exactitude of a Robert Edmond Jones forest (the last example of which was seen, by the way, in The Enchanted, the Giraudoux play presented in New York in 1950. Messel therefore had a challenging task, not lightened by the fact than in Rashomon he is called upon to suggest an Oriental forest without falling into pagoda-ridden cliche.
The costumes he has designed are, of course, in the authentic style of Japan of a thousand years ago. Clothes are actual, and have to be worn; selectiveness and suitability are required, but it has always seemed to me that impressionism in costume is almost always dangerous. The last unequivocal example of an unrealistic approach to the theatrical costume that stays in my mind was, curiously enough, a Shakespearean Memorial Theatre production of King Lear, which I saw in London. It was designed by a Japanese artist. John Gielgud was Lear, and although the abstract scenery was often beautiful in its groupings of vast geometrical shapes, the abstract costumes were a constant distraction. Indeed, in the latter part of the play, Lear's rags were indicated by formalized oval holes cut in a pale yellow garment, and Lear consequently bore a startling resemblence to a slice of Swiss cheese.
Finally, one of the most gratifying elements of this production of Rashomon is the action of America's dean of designers in consenting to undertake the lighting of the play. I refer, of course, to Jo Mielziner, who was sufficiently enthusiastic about the script and about Oliver Messel's designs to make an exception and to light a decor not designed by himself. It is, I understand, the only occasion he has done this, and is indeed a happy example of hands across the sea.

Photo in article: Three of the leading roles in Rashomon are played by Claire Bloom, Noel Willman (center) and Rod Steiger. The play by Fay and Michael Kanin is based on Japanese stories by Ryunosuke Akutogawa.