A small group sits in a windowless Public Theater rehearsal room, but the combination of dramatic taiko drumming, the sight of many of the actors clad only in the traditional mawashi (cloth-belt) costumes, and the painful thwack, thwack, thwack of bodies hitting the hard surface of the dohyō (ring) over and over again makes it feel as if we are at an actual sumo wrestling bout.
Instead we are witnessing Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play, Sumo (Public, to March 20), in which six men live and train together at an elite sumo training facility in Tokyo, their intertwined stories told through the fighting they do. The excellent play folds into its structure sumo’s rules and traditions, such as its place within the Shinto religion. So much besides who wins and loses is revealed as their bodies lock up.
The play—a co-production of the Ma-Yi Theater Company, whose primary mission to develop and produce new and innovative plays by Asian American writers, and theLa Jolla Playhouse where Sumo was previously staged—examines masculinity, sexuality, honor, love, and ambition featuring actors who are, amazingly, not wrestlers themselves. (The convincingly executed fighting is down to the training of sumo consultant James Yaegashi and Ralph B. Peña’s direction.)
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