KABUKI’S BACK--AND MOSTLY ADMIRED

Japan’s Grand Kabuki has returned to America, to admiring reviews--with reservations.

Clive Barnes of the New York Post found the company’s opening program at the Metropolitan Opera (to be seen Aug. 7-11 at Royce Hall, UCLA) “unforgettable.” He was impressed by the last play, a love/death drama called “Kasane,” starring the company’s great onnagata (male actress), Tamasaburo.

Here was “the conflagration of the true Kabuki.” But the first part of the evening Barnes found “slow to take fire,” especially the ceremony where a new actor takes on the prestigious title of Danjuro XII.

“Shibaraku” reminded Women’s Wear Daily’s Joseph H. Mazo of a Clint Eastwood Western, if Eastwood could be imagined wearing 18-inch lifts, a six-foot sword and “a costume so vast that its square sleeves must be stretched on wooden rods.”

Bill Zakariasen of the Daily News was fascinated by the sound of Kabuki. “Whether singing or speaking, the 30-odd gentlemen who make up this troupe are cause for absolute wonderment. Their sounds range from the raspy coo of Neil Diamond to the howls of Godzilla in heat. . . .”

The reviews were even better for the company’s second program, which, for some reason, Los Angeles won’t see. Those who would like to know more about the sights and sounds of Kabuki should attend Dr. Leonard Pronko’s lecture-demonstration at 2 p.m. today at the Japan America Theatre; (213) 680-3700.

Coincidentally, Washington is seeing a Kabuki version of Euripides’ “Medea,” presented by Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge Theatre at the Kennedy Center. Shozo Sato’s staging departs from strict Kabuki tradition by using an actress in the lead, Barbara E. Robertson.

David Richards of the Washington Post found the production guilty of “ersatz gravity,” sometimes to the point of silliness. But it also provided a new way of looking at a familiar myth.

The highlight of the show, for Richards, was the scene where Medea murders her two little sons--”cherubic-looking dolls manipulated by ‘invisible’ prop men garbed in black. Robertson also transforms herself into a puppet at that moment, all limp and hollow, until the propmen position her head . . . and literally drive her to murder.”

No one reads Anne Sexton’s poetry as powerfully as Salome Jens. She’s done so at Stages and at the Westwood Playhouse, and now she has brought her one-woman show, “. . . About Anne,” to the Women’s Interart Center in New York.

Writes D.J.R. Bruckner in The New York Times: “In Miss Jens’ voice, the Sexton wit can bite, and the actress can make the poet’s clarity of vision a harrowing thing. But tenderness has its power here, too, especially in Mrs. Sexton’s poem to one of her daughters. And the tenderness turns to heartbreak in the actress’ reading of ‘The Break Away,’ about Mrs. Sexton’s divorce.” In short, “Mrs. Jens does not read the poems, she acts them. Her command of the stage is complete.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. John Patrick Shanley in his new play at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, “The Dreamer Examines His Pillow”: “If you wanna go in a straight line, give up people. People are what zigzag.”