Theatre Gigante’s Season Begins with ‘Madness’

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A&E Feature

Theatre Gigante opens their 35th season with a great lost silent film accompanied by a live band and a visiting scholar who will give a talk before the screening and answer questions afterward. They’ve done silent movies as performances before, including F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. But their presentation of A Page of Madness by Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa will be accompanied by a benshi, reenacting the role played bt live narrators in Japanese silent cinema of commenting on the screen action to the audience.

With Gigante’s presentation of A Page of Madness, the benshi, Nanako Yamauchi, will be challenged to keep pace with the expressionistic montage of images. “It’s not a linear story,” says Co-Artistic Director Isabelle Kralj. “The film gets into the characters’ emotions and fantasies. You’re watching what’s going on in the characters’ heads.”

A Page of Madness is exemplary of the modernism that flourished in 1920s Japan before being snuffed in the 1930s as a militaristic, militantly nationalistic regime consolidated power. For many years the 1926 film was missing along with most of Japan’s early cinema—what wasn’t lost to careless handling was consumed in the firebombing of Japan during World War II. However, the lone surviving copy of A Page of Madness was rediscovered in the 1970s by its director, who had stashed it in a rice barrel at his country home decades earlier.

The surrealistic film will be accompanied by Gigante’s longtime collaborators, Little Bang Theory, playing toy and handmade instruments to a score by Frank Pahl. “His compositions are sensitive to the story’s emotions. He gives themes to the characters,” Kralj says. The visiting scholar will be University of Michigan professor of Asian cinema Markus Nornes. “We’ve had lively, long talk-backs in the past,” Kralj says. One talk-back following Gigante’s 2018 staging of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was longer than the performance.

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Theatre Gigante was started by Kralj as Milwaukee Dance Theatre. She began working with Mark Anderson in 1996; he became co-artistic director in 1999. With programming that overflowed the boundaries of both dance and theater, they changed the name in 2008 to the more open-ended Theatre Gigante. “We like art across disciplines,” Anderson says, describing a catalog of performances that have included everything from Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell to a concert by accordionist Guy Klucevsek to Mark O’Rowe’s Joycean play Terminus.

Gigante was criticized early on as too eclectic for its guess-what’s-coming-next format, frustrating for those who think only in yes-and-no or black-and-white. “We got by through sheer tenaciousness,” Kralj says. “We just kept doing it.”

A Page of Madness will be screened-performed on Oct. 8 and Oct. 9 at Kenilworth 508 Theatre, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place, 5th floor. For more information, visit theatregigante.org.