A small group sits in a windowless Public Theater rehearsal room, but the combination of dramatic taiko drumming, the sight of many of the actors clad only in the traditional mawashi (cloth-belt) costumes, and the painful thwack, thwack, thwack of bodies hitting the hard surface of the dohyō (ring) over and over again makes it feel as if we are at an actual sumo wrestling bout.
Instead we are witnessing Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play, Sumo (Public, to March 30), in which six men live and train together at an elite sumo training facility in Tokyo, their intertwined stories told through the fighting they do. The excellent play folds into its structure sumo’s rules and traditions, such as its place within the Shinto religion. So much besides who wins and loses is revealed as their bodies lock up.
The play—a co-production of the Ma-Yi Theater Company, whose primary mission to develop and produce new and innovative plays by Asian American writers, and the La Jolla Playhouse where Sumo was previously staged—examines masculinity, sexuality, honor, love, and ambition featuring actors who are, amazingly, not wrestlers themselves. (The convincingly executed fighting is down to the training of sumo consultant James Yaegashi and Ralph B. Peña’s direction; Yaegashi is also co-fight director with Chelsea Pace.)
“I felt such pride and strength when I put on the mawashi for the first time, standing in front of the mirror,” actor Scott Keiji Takeda says. “It feels so honorable, and so powerful. It changes the way you stand and move. I always thought costumes were the last piece of any role, but this costume is absolutely essential. And I think for all the actors, seeing each other in our mawashi, gave us a sense of collective power.”
A sumo wrestler loses if any part of their body, except the soles of their feet, touches the ground. There are no weight classes, so anyone can face anyone. Those who choose front-row seats at the Public will be especially up and close and personal with the action.
The rehearsal room is hot, and the feeling of being so enclosed and intimate—as they grapple, the wrestlers come within a hair’s breadth of us—intensifies the experience of watching the play, alongside Shih-Wei Wu’s drumming. Takeda said that being so close to an audience while so scantily clad can be “a little jarring. But it adds a level of excitement to the whole show”—especially for an audience that in the majority is not likely to have attended a sumo bout before.
Takeda plays Akio, an 18-year-old angry young man who comes to the heya where wrestlers train, but is relegated to sweeping and serving. He wants to rise in the ranks, but is constantly derided and denigrated—and, ouch, thrown to the ground over and over again.
Mitsuo (David Shih), a seasoned veteran, seems to revel in causing Akio as much pain, literal and otherwise, as possible. Another major storyline is best seen unrevealed before attending. Why, and what, the play asks, does authority, responsibility, and the winner’s mantle really mean? With sponsorship money and honor at stake, could being the best be healthily redefined?
The rest of the cast—Red Concepción, Michael Hisamoto, Ahmad Kamal, Earl T. Kim, Paco Tolson, Viet Vo, and Kris Bona—animate and embody the lives and passions of the other wrestlers and characters, emphasizing how much has been invested and sacrificed in pursuit of excellence, victory, and mastery.
Dring watched sumo in Hawaii growing up, then 12 years ago, became reacquainted with it on a personal trip to Japan she took following her mother’s death.
In the tournaments she attended, she observed “so much beauty in the ritual, history, and ceremony of it. I’ve never seen a sport like that before—it’s really half-art, half-sport. When I learned more about it, it felt like a devotional practice for me. Art is a spiritual practice, so that’s my way in. What is it to give yourself to something so fully that it alchemizes you to someone different once it’s done with you?”
The play’s humor, Peña says, is “the most important and best coating to deliver messages to an audience. It’s the grease that makes it easier, and the golden formula for compelling theater.”
“This play uses fighting as a love language”
Takeda says he has had bruises, “but they fade”—and the adrenaline of fighting obscures any physical pain until he gets home every night. Shih has “definitely had cramps, and it’s tough on the quads and inner thighs because we’re always in these low positions. It’s been like boot camp. We conditioned and trained our bodies a month before we started rehearsing.”
“Normally, in a show you have to lose weight,” Shih adds. “Here it’s quite the opposite. It’s not what I’m used to portraying, but it’s really liberating to allow yourself to inhabit this shape.” He laughed, adding that when he told his doctor for advice on how to gain weight for the role, he received the blunt response: “Please don’t.”
Yaegashi is proud of the training the actors have committed so wholeheartedly to. “I feel hurt just by watching them,” he tells the Daily Beast. He helped teach the actors to lower the center of gravity of their bodies, and in the fight scenes to share the weight of their bodies, “like you’re having a physical conversation,” to create the illusion of grappling.
Unlike in many plays, he says, the fight scenes are not one-offs or climactic; they reveal both story and character: “This play uses fighting as a love language.”
The actors have been taught how to fall and roll correctly, and so, while a doctor and masseur are both on call, there have been few injuries, apart from the odd sprain. “Oddly, because of the intimacy of the play, there have been a lot of colds, and when we did the play at La Jolla, the whole cast got Covid,” Yaegashi says.
Early on, Peña and Yaesgashi talked to the actors about the level of undress the play required, and to go at their own disrobing pace during rehearsals in order to feel comfortable performing.
Some of the actors had been wearing just the mawashi in rehearsal, others came in T-shirts. A few days after I visited, all the actors—now running through the play in the Public’s Anspacher Theater arena-like space, evocatively designed as a competitive space by Wilson Chin—sported costume designer Mariko Ohigashi’s mawashi.
“They are not comfortable,” Yaegashi said. “An intimacy garment underneath makes it a bit more bearable. But in sumo you have to grab it, lift it, hold up a 300-pound body. Think about that.”
The bigger actors, Peña said, had told him it had been wonderful to have larger bodies not only required for, but celebrated in the play, when so often being bigger can be a grounds of rejection by casting directors. Peña wanted the play to have a defined “physical language” appropriate not only for realistic fighting but also to “represent Asian men in a way that American theater rarely sees: masculine, powerful, and strong. We’re usually given feminized versions of ourselves on stage.”
“It’s a really special project”
Dring—accompanied by her adorable dog, Ponyo, who cheerfully greets and sniffs around everyone in the rehearsal room—said she found she breathed differently after seeing sumo for the first time.
Her research deepened when she returned to America, with the added unique perspective of being a woman—and therefore traditionally excluded from sumo training spaces. She references Meryl Streep’s thoughts on women’s lifelong acquaintance with learning of the “the language of men,” even if men have never learned the same of women.
“As women, we’ve had to move around men our whole lives,” says Dring. “I feel I know and don’t know the language of men. The process of writing the play has taught me how to love men, be curious about them, and trust them. I wanted to look at a sports story not as a conquering and dominance story, but as submission and surrender, and examine the masculine and feminine in eastern—and western—conversations.”
For Shih, the play, its characters, cast, and themes are “especially important at a time like now when people in power are trying to do away with diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“It’s a really special project,” Shih added. “I’ve been in the business for 20-ish years. When I started, there were not a lot of roles for people who looked like me. Now we’re here, with a show with all-Asian actors. I thought about quitting the business several times, asking myself, ‘Do I want to play the doctor or delivery guy again?’ There have been Asian roles played by white people. Being here in this production with this cast feels so fortunate. As Ralph has said, we need to make progress not just for us, but for the people who come after us.”
Yaegashi hopes the play provides “an alternative view from the prevailing western view” of masculinity and provides a glimpse into a world for a majority-western audience “they don’t have a point of reference for, and what that might open up for them.”
Peña would like audiences to extrapolate from the unique perspective of Sumo—a female playwright’s observations of a specific all-male world—the importance of thinking about the world more generally “through different lenses. If we did, we might have a shot at a better world.”
Dring paused when asked how she anticipated an audience might respond to her work. Then she recalled leaving a sumo bout and feeling “it was like seeing beautiful art. Everything felt brighter, life felt more alive. So, I would love it if people left Sumo feeling more alive.”
