12-Jan-2012 - Violence, Addicting Yet Ugly

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Hideki Noda’s assured play “The Bee,” inspired by a short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, is a ghoulish fairy tale, mixing extreme perversion with jarringly simple and elegant stage craft. Its theme, the price of revenge, evokes that of movies like “Straw Dogs” or “The Last House on the Left.” It also shares the suggestion that we all have a savage beast lurking underneath our civilized veneers. NHL jerseys (The telling cliché of a mirror on the back wall reveals the audience.) What elevates this show is its form. The production, confidently staged in English by Mr. Noda (who also plays the criminal’s wife), has a brilliantly orchestrated pace. It starts quick and comic, then slows to a crawl. The businessman, Ido (Kathryn Hunter, in another of the play’s gender-bending turns), gets a thrill out of his violence, always punctuated with a triumphant, stylized, slow-motion dance. NFL jerseys supply But its bizarrely downbeat and ritualized manner makes it clear that the production has a very different point of view toward violence from that of its protagonist. What becomes apparent is that while Ido might have once wanted his family back and justice, violent revenge has its own logic. And once you surrender to it, the insane gradually becomes normal, even mundane. Ido’s celebrations, once passionate, start to seem as rote as brushing your teeth in the NFL jersey supply morning. And while the action begins cartoonish, inside a rubber square that looks like a boxing ring, it ends in a deliberate, almost tedious rhythm. The news media move on. The police find a new case. One man goes mad, and no one notices.

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