The experiences of Japanese women working as compliant slavelike laborers in pre-World War II Japan provide the foundation of "Thread Hell," the final main stage production of the 2012-2013 theater season at Kennedy Theatre.
Written by Kishida Rio, a major figure in Japanese "angura" (underground) theater, and directed by visiting director Colleen Lanki, a specialist in Japanese theater, "Thread Hell" is a mystical and surreal tale of death, revenge, prostitution and the exploitation and manipulation of women by men.
| ‘THREAD HELL’
>> Where: Kennedy Theatre, University of Hawaii at Manoa
>> When: 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday
>> Cost: $24 ($22 seniors, military and UH faculty and staff; $13 students; $5 UHM students)
>> Info: 956-7655 or www.hawaii.edu/kennedy
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Leah Koeppel stars as Cocoon, a mysterious woman in blue who has no memories but believes for some reason that her mother is employed in a Tokyo silk spinning mill known as Thread House. The female workers, who are known as "thread women" and whose names correspond to the suits in "hanafuda," a traditional Japanese card game, spin silk thread by day and work as prostitutes at night.
Serina Dunham (Cherry) provides comic content in the role of a childish 17-year-old who chooses to become a thread woman, and presumably a prostitute as well.
Isaac Ligsay (Rope) plays the alpha male of the mill, and his treatment of the women is equal parts businessman, pimp, father figure and puppeteer.
Nicholas Murray Husted (Straw), Shaun Dikilato (Fishing Gut), Ben Saunders (Paper String) and Tristan Holmes (Cord) play Rope’s male minions as menacing yet vulnerable types. Holmes also plays a government registrar whose concerns about the women at Thread House are focused on whether they are listed on the appropriate family register as required by Japanese law.
Things begin to spin out of control for Rope and his minions when the women, who are supposedly under the control of the men, respond to demands to tell their life stories with tales that invariably end with the female narrator killing a man.
Cocoon’s search for her mother also involves the death of a man that parallels the treacherous stories of the thread women.
The production may have been too mysterious for many theater patrons as it opened Friday to a surprisingly small number of adventurous play-goers.
There is no mystery, however, in the artistic quality of the presentation: Cheri Vasek’s color-cued costume designs, Brian Shevelenko’s effective use of sound effects, and Meg Hanna’s multilevel set dominated by a sloping ramp that leads down to the hell within the mill, all make the production visually interesting even when the story seems to be moving at glacial speed.
