Death in Vacant Lot!

Terayama Shuji’s avant-garde film masterpiece, Den’en ni Shisu (Death in the Fields), has been adapted for the stage as Death in Vacant Lot!, a play with music, by The South Wing, an international theater company now working in New York.

Terayama Shuji’s 1974 film, Den’en ni Shisu (Death in the Fields), depicts an adolescent boy in prewar Japan who runs away from home. The boy’s coming of age is an allegory for Japan’s loss of innocence during Word War II. Wrought with conflicting pastoral images which are alternately romantic and sexually brutal, realistic and fantastic, the film makes particular use of the traditional Japanese tanka poetic form filled with very modern and often taboo or grotesque imagery. Terayama grew up in an era when Japan was occupied by U.S. forces, far away from his mother, who worked as a prostitute for U.S. enlisted men. The character representing him in the film endures a loss of innocence as his mother is lost to an invader or rapist figure. The historical metaphor is clear: just as loss of innocence is something that is forced upon the young, it was also forced on Japan as a whole in consequence of its egregious imperialism leading up to WWII.

In Death in Vacant Lot!, Kameron Steele (The South Wing’s Artistic Director) adapts the film as a Tommy-style rock opera employing modernist music and a 21st Century American “post Global Village” context. Terayama’s text, translated into English by Steele, is staged with choreography, choral and solo song, tanka poetry, live and occasionally pre-recorded electric and acoustic music. Using J.A. Ceasar’s extant soundtrack to Den’en ni Shisu as context, four composer/musicians collaborated on a new musical score that juxtaposes ’60s Japanese folk-rock and contemporary electronic experimental music. Selections of Caesar’s score that were unused in the film are also employed, as are a combination of acoustic sounds and electronic, computer-driven music, all of which is designed to underscore the timelessness of the conceptual themes. Believing that societies, like individuals, undergo a loss of innocence, usually resulting in either self-realization or self-destruction, Steele draws parallels between Japan’s loss of innocence during the 30 years surrounding WWII and the loss of innocence he imagines happening over the next 20 years for the United States.

The bulk of The South Wing’s development process for Death in Vacant Lot! has taken place at the Watermill Center, avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson’s theater laboratory.