Kabuki performances during the Occupation. This fact alone, how-
ever, does not account for the powerful attraction the Kabuki has
exerted on Americans. At the beginning of the century many percep-
tive Americans saw Kabuki and dismissed it as either incomprehen-
sible or naïve. That the playwright Paul Green has described the
Kabuki as 'in the main, the finest theatre art in the world' suggests
that our conceptions of the theatre have undergone profound changes
in the last forty or fifty years.

It is significant that on the only occasion that Kabuki has been
played outside Japan, at Leningrad and Moscow in 1928, Russian
audiences found nothing new or startling in the performances. There
was nothing in it, they felt, which had not been seen in the productions
of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold, at that time a leading régisseur,
had begun his career in the Moscow Art Theatre, which, under
Stanislavsky, was devoted to the realistic school of acting. However,
Meyerhold broke with the realistic theatre and formulated a highly
stylized, nonrepresentational manner of production. Although
Russian audiences viewed the 'feudal' subject matter of the Kabuki
with dismay, their familiarity with Meyerhold's productions had pre-
pared them to accept the nonrealistic and frankly theatrical idiom of
the Kabuki.

The contemporary movement toward a theatre freed from late
nineteenth-century naturalism seems to have gained more ground in
Europe than in America. But in recent years, despite the general
unwillingness of producers to forgo the commercially reliable
realistic production, our more adventurous directors and playwrights
have made commercial successes of plays not patterned after the con-
ventional realistic theatre. Forty years ago the mode of production of
such plays as Death of a Salesman and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof would
have been incomprehensible to American audiences. Today such pro-
ductions are widely acceptable; but if The Girl of the Golden West
could be re-created now in the same form in which Belasco staged it,
audiences would probably find its straining for 'realistic' effects

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