assignment3

Among the Noh plays you have read, select one that appeals to you the most and discuss why you are drawn to it above all the other works. You may wish to refer to the video illustrations of the excerpts of the plays that we saw in class, as well as the scripts to compose your answer.

The play that I felt the most for was Izutsu by Zeami. I didn't get anywhere near the kind of emotional reaction to the othe Noh plays we watched, they they were beautiful peices of theater. There was a sense of desolation at the heart of the peice that made of every line of dialogue poignant, even if the language was being translated for me. There was also something that was slightly disturbing about the way the play proceeded, especially when we see the woman at the center of the play in her former lovers clothing by the well. It seemed to speak of life completely destroyed by the loss of love. We also wer enot made to particularly hate the young man, nor find him particularly cruel and it is made clear that it was a simple matter of the heart that made him leave. That makes it much harder to watch the fact that he has destroyed a woman's life and psyche. The character is tragic because she lives for the man that left her utterly and is destroyed by that, in contrast to other romantic tragedies where the death of the character is made more palatable by the fact of the depth of feeling the characters (often suicides) felt for one another.

It was a chilling and saddening kind of a production

Word Count: 225

Sources: Video from class, text of Izutsu by Zeami