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This language professor teaches and performs Japanese theater.

Some say zen is about transcending the pain and disappointment of life by thoughtfully accepting what is not, as well as what is.

Take PSU professor Laurence “Larry” Kominz, for example. One day this nice Unitarian kid from Washington, D.C., had to accept that his life goal was not going to be easy—might not even be possible at all.

He was in Kyoto, Japan, onstage in the middle of a classical Japanese Noh play. He was a gaijin, a white foreigner, surrounded by Japanese professionals who had devoted their lives to perfecting their art. Then Kominz committed the most unthinkable taboo possible on the Noh stage.

“I forgot my lines and I tried—unsuccessfully—to extemporize in medieval Japanese,” he says. “The master of the school was there.

“It was like screwing up a piano recital in front of Rachmaninoff.”

Yet ironically, once Kominz accepted that he had no future on the classical Japanese stage, he started on the path to becoming one of the foremost experts on Japanese theater in the United States.

During the past year alone, Kominz presented conference papers at Stanford, Yale, and at the Shakespeare Theatre institute in Washington, D.C. He wrote a chapter in a volume published on world literature and is waiting word on three more chapters. He’s performed Japanese dance and comedy all over Oregon, including twice with his son, a bilingual Japanese-American 16-year-old. He was named to the performance advisory committee of the prestigious Japan Society of New York.

Oh, and in June, Kominz helped organize the 2005 Chikamatsu-za Grand Kabuki Tour, bringing a master Grand Kabuki troupe direct from Tokyo to Seattle, Berkeley, and Los Angeles. Kominz wrote all the tour’s program notes, wrote and recorded the audio guide for theater audiences, and wrote four articles for The Seattle Times used in a public school educational curriculum on the project. His only regret was that the tour didn’t stop in Portland. “We couldn’t get a big enough venue,” he says.

All that work comes on top of his regular teaching of Japanese language and culture classes, and, starting this fall, Kominz will fill in as director of PSU’s Center for Japanese Studies, which provides programming to further student and community understanding of Japan.

Ask Kominz to list his most recent accomplishments, and it’s the annual final exam for his PSU summer “Kabuki in English” workshop—the test is a live stage performance—that brings out the deepest ring of pride in his voice. He dwells on it.

“The students—their buy-in is so total—they’re able to give me more energy and expertise than I could ever dream of,” Kominz says. “Costume designers, wigmakers, movement, makeup—every year people come out of the woodwork to share these abilities.”

Kominz was born in Washington, D.C., to an artistic homemaker and a biochemist in the U.S. Public Health Service. The family moved repeatedly due to his father’s job, including two stints in Japan during Kominz’s elementary and middle school years. His time in Japan proved unforgettable.

“My mother had been a jazz dance and yoga fan, and she took a classical dance class in Japan,” Kominz says. She also studied traditional Japanese archery, “with a longbow between her fingers, with this ritualistic pulling of the string over her head,” he recalls as he mimes the movements. “She threw herself into Japanese culture.”

Although Kominz studied no Japanese as a child, he remained interested. Unfortunately, as a teenager, he studied French. “My American school guidance counselor told me Japanese was a minor language,” he says ruefully.

That changed at Colby College in Maine, where Kominz started studying Japanese in his freshman year. “I really loved it in spite of the fact that it was agonizingly hard,” he says.

A turning point came in his junior year, which he spent at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. His fellow students studied zen, the bamboo flute, business, and economics; Kominz studied theater and started carving Noh masks.

“I wanted a different kind of person to be with than my American friends,” he says; the Noh actors were practicing Buddhists. “I got the sense that petty egoism was not part of the Japanese art scene—I really thought of it as more of a spiritual experience.”

Eventually, Kominz realized that, petty egoism or not, there were permanent obstacles to his ever becoming a professional Kyôgen artist in Japan.

“I was an amateur disciple,” he says. “The teachers knew I couldn’t stick with it for the decades it takes to become a professional.

“And as a gaijin I would always stand out, even when playing the hundreds of minor parts required of a professional apprentice. It would change the meaning of the plays I was in.”

Kominz decided to become an academic. He won a prestigious Watson Fellowship after graduation, then shipped off to graduate school at Columbia University to study Japanese literature.

“From the time I was in Japan my junior year of college, I’ve felt that you can’t understand the literature of drama, which is what I got my Ph.D. in, unless you’ve performed it yourself,” he says. “I’ve never entirely left performance behind.”

In Portland’s Imago Theatre, a shimmering panel of light blue silk hangs suspended from the center of a large stage. Suddenly the silk shimmers to the ground, revealing more than a dozen actors in elaborate Japanese costumes, posed in a tableau. This is the final exam for Kominz’s summer Kabuki in English workshop, and it is trial by fire.

Hovering over a video of the play on a large-screen television, Kominz talks just like a director, pointing out minute details of makeup, costume, movement. This particular play is a comedy, but nevertheless, rigidly controlled movement as well as subtlety are important.

“In Japan, all Kabuki actors are men, and the hardest thing for me to do onstage, personally, is to play a woman—any woman,” Kominz says, pointing at the screen. “Look at the way she sways, very soft—it’s really important, for a courtesan.”

This is a significant departure from what a Japanese audience would expect to see in a production of this play, Uiro Uri, (in English, The Medicine Peddler, performance pictured at right). In addition to women, the cast includes multiracial actors.

However, the amazing kimonos worn for the production give the play authenticity. Kominz points out their variety—from rich brocade to plain brown cotton. Putting on a kimono is a ritual all by itself, he says; the kimonos they wear are a key part of the actors’ ability to psychologically meld with their characters.

“I couldn’t even begin to present Japanese theater without the help of my wife, Toshimi,” Kominz says. “She’s a professional kimono dresser and it’s thanks to her that we can achieve a sumptuous and authentic look onstage.”

Kabuki is very stylized and strictly choreographed, right down to the movements of a character’s toes, but the structure is somehow deceiving. At first it all seems quite staid and slow-moving; the dialogue sounds weird, like random, intense vocalizations.

Slowly it dawns on the casual Western observer that the characters are speaking English. Now, below the exotic trappings, they’re moving into what is unmistakably an Abbott and Costello sketch, the one where Lou Costello—the short, funny one—is trying to flirt with a gaggle of pretty courtesans. Wait—courtesans in an Abbott and Costello skit? Uiro Uri predates Abbott and Costello by about 400 years, but the giggling audience doesn’t seem concerned with that.

“I have done scholarship on Japanese humor onstage, and my research shows that the impetus to humor is universal, not particular,” Kominz says. “If it’s verbal humor it may need a lot of explanation; if it’s physical humor—that’s humor anyone can understand.”

And when the acrobatic fight scenes begins, Kominz says, “Portland audiences gasp just like Japanese audiences do.”

It’s this moment where it’s possible to appreciate Kominz’s‚ true talent—the combination of dusty-desk scholarship and the ability to bring Japanese culture alive on the other side of the world.

“This production was a dream come true,” he says. “My translation of a Kabuki play I published in 2002, from a corpus of plays I’ve studied since 1980, presented to a public that knows nothing of my scholarship,” Kominz says. “It was standing room only—and they loved it.”

Lisa Loving, a Portland freelance writer, is a frequent contributor to PSU Magazine.

On the Stage

Professor Larry Kominz is unusual—in that he has successfully performed a wide range of Japanese theater forms, including:

Kabuki - A large-scale ensemble theater with origins in the Edo period, from roughly 1600 to 1850. It was popular with townspeople and has been compared to the Western tradition of vaudeville.

Buyô - The dance that forms the basis of movement in kabuki theater.

Noh - A symbolic theater art focusing on ritual in a rarefied aesthetic atmosphere; it was traditionally enjoyed by the upper classes.

Kyôgen - A form of comedy using stylized movement and stock characters in plays that stand the social order on its head—The unempowered triumph over the rich and powerful. Kyôgen developed simultaneously with Noh, but in many ways is its exact opposite.

Bunraku - Japanese puppet theater, which uses very large puppets operated—without strings—by puppeteers who remain onstage throughout.

Read about the role the PSU Center for Japanese Studies has in bringing dance, animation, business, and royalty to campus.