Noh Theatre meets Yeats

[Paul Thomas]

If media and culture cycles can accelerate to the degree that even the vapid 80's is a well far enough back from which the creatively-impoverished international style mavens can draw, then I think now is the appropriate time to both mourn for, and revive (necromancy? necrophilia?) the halcyon days of this forum youth, when it discussed Yeats and Noh.

In fact, in the spirit of wanton cultural syncretism, let's revive both at the same time: Yeats's _Four Plays_ which were inspired by Noh, and are quite delicious reading on their own. I've never had the opportunity to see them performed, and imagine like most work which was "fringe" at it's time, that done improperly they could be excruciating.

Pick it up at your local library

Yeats: "With the help of Japanese plays 'translated by Ernest Fenollosa and edited by Ezra Pound,' I have invented a new form of drama, distinguished, indirect, and symbolic... "

(edited as a shame-facéd typo-correction (as one who writes the genetive of his son's name as "Seamus's") to arrant pedantry (pax Mr. O'Keefe), up with which I (with pleasure) will put.)

(Corrections and Edits sponsored by the Nested and Iterated Paragraph Liberation Society (in flagrant disregard of good style).())

(Sponsorship sponsored by the Society for the Proliferation of Acronym Silliness and Mayhem)