What are the chances that on a given day you can see performances by American theater masters influenced by the Japanese arts? On Sunday afternoon, a little known, experimental work by Tennessee Williams, “The Day a Man Died,” was performed at East Hampton's Ross School. Forget the romantic reveries of “Glass Menagerie,” “Cat on a Hot, Tin Roof,” and “Streetcar Named Desire”-the plays on which Williams' iconic legacy is based. Part of the Tennessee Williams Festival that also revived “Sweet Bird of Youth” in Provincetown earlier this summer, the one-act play features a painter inspired by Jackson Pollock in a final swoon. According to director David Kaplan, “Williams seems to have been aware of and appropriated the effects of the Japanese Gutai artists, who crawled in the mud, painted with their feet, shot paint from guns, crashed through paper walls, and staged performances well before the artists commonly credited with their invention, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, and Yves Klein.” Williams had known Pollock in the '40's and after a 1957 visit with Larry Rivers in Southampton, the playwright constructed this theater piece illustrating the artist's passionate painting as crazed performance. The actor Jeff Christian in g-string is head to toe encrusted in color: red, yellow, his spine delineated in black. His mistress (a fine-boned Jennie Moreau in a Liz Taylor a la “Butterfield 8” wig) bares her breasts, cajoles the artist and feeds his self-doubt. Subtitled “An Occidental Noh Play,” the work nods to the 14th century form that combines music, dance, and storytelling. First staged in Chicago, the play is presented in conjunction with the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center's exhibition: “Under Each Other's Spell: Gutai and New York.” At the reception held at the Pollock-Krasner house, the director of this historic Springs foundation, Helen Harrison, spoke about her early misgivings when offered the script to “The Day a Man Died,” but then revisited the work after its success in Chicago. The actress Sylvia Miles who had starred earlier this summer in the Williams work in Provincetown attended, and in a brief tete a tete with Moreau, the young actress invited the legendary Miles back to Provincetown for a final performance: “Come up. Let's play.” 

“KOOL: Dancing in my Mind,” a multi-media performance /portrait of the choreographer and dancer Suzushi Hanayagi by Robert Wilson, Carla Blank, and Richard Rutkowski was conceived as a tribute to the Japanese artist who collaborated with Wilson on 15 works. Originally part of the Guggenheim Museum's stunning exhibition, “The Third Mind: American Arts Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989,” the work was revived at Guild Hall for two sold-out performances. On Sunday evening, Robert Wilson introduced the performance explaining Suzushi's important influence, and how, sad to say, having not heard from her, in 2007 he found her in an Osaka nursing home in a wheelchair suffering from Alzheimer's. Nevertheless the artists planned their final collaboration, as Suzushi assured Wilson the subtitle of the piece. With Rutkowski's archival video of the Japanese performer in kimono melding traditional dance with modern moves, six dancers of varied age and gender performed excerpts from her collaborations with Wilson and Blank: 1990's solo experiments with jazz, classic Japanese dance, juxtaposed with video portraits of Hanayagi's face, hands, and feet. Each gesture of the moving figures could be frozen as a complete thoroughly absorbing, emotional work of art. In movement, the work is sublime.

Regina Weinreich