"The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," an adaptation of Yukio Mishima's 1956 novel playing this weekend at the Lincoln Center Festival, begins in what looks like a classroom. Set designer Boris Kudli?ka's large chalkboard, desks and chairs, and institutional walls prepare the audience for a tidy coming-of-age tale. But the set pieces never sit still, collapsing and rearranging themselves to mirror the impossible-to-organize mind of a Kafkaesque hero. The production, directed by Amon Miyamoto (who brought "Pacific Overtures" to the festival in 2002), takes its time dragging the protagonist toward his catastrophic climax, but the result is epic and deeply unsettling.
The stuttering and underconfident Mizoguchi, devastatingly played by Go Morita, is the subject of this psychodrama. After losing his father and being dumped in a temple to become a priest, Mizoguchi moves between two deep friendships that each fail to save him from his self-hatred and sexual paranoia. Miyamoto has staged the proceedings as a flowing cinematic montage that jostles between tender stillness and expressionist howls of pain. In an outer frame, passages are read aloud from the novel's first-person narrative, underscoring the splattered nature of the hero's consciousness. A group of six Butoh dancers makes a threatening chorus, circling the ghostly pale Fuyuki Yamakawa, who plays the creepy temple spirit that Mizoguchi ultimately blames for all his troubles.
Miyamoto's obvious respect for the novel explains both his artistic rigor and overly stern pace. Sousuke Takaoka's performance as Mizoguchi's more sinister friend Tsurukawa succeeds in part because he is permitted a liveliness denied the other performers (another exception is Rei Okamoto, underused as Mizoguchi's mother). Perhaps a more intimate space than the Rose Theater would justify the intensity of Mizoguchi's psychic breakdown. As it is, not until its final moments does the production feel quite at home. Nonetheless, "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is a model of how chaos can be disciplined, spectacle can be simple, and image, sound, and voice can coalesce into a work of terrible beauty.
Presented by Parco Co., in association with Gorgeous Entertainment, as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2011 at the Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall, 33 W. 60th St., 11th floor, NYC. July 21–24 Thu.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (212) 721-6500 or www.lincolncenterfestival.org.