Theatre in Review: The Bee (Under the Radar/Japan House)One hostage situation multiplies into two in The Bee, a black comedy-horror parable about man's addiction to violence. Hideki Noda's script, based on a story by Yasutaka Tsuitsui, is a bipolar exercise in storytelling -- flippant at the opening, deadly serious later on. It begins with Ido, a typical Japanese salaryman, returning home from a hard day's work to find the street where he lives flooded with cops and reporters. The reason: Ogoro, an escaped prisoner, has broken into Ido's house, and is holding his wife and son hostage. The opening passages of The Bee aren't exactly groundbreaking -- jokes about rapacious reporters and ineffective cops have been with us since the dawn of man -- but there's something bracing about the authors' determination to play this awful situation for laughs. "I assure you, Mr. Ido, for the time being they're safe," says the detective whose Zen-like fascination, in the midst of crisis, with his pencil sharpener is hardly a confidence-builder. "You mean they will be in danger later on?" snaps Ido, cutting through the other's bureaucratic evasions with dagger-like logic. Meanwhile, the members of the press, aiming for the perfect sound bite, try to direct Ido's responses. "Can't you give us more emotion?" asks one. "Can you do tears?" asks another. If Noda and Tsuitsui had pushed their joke to its logical conclusion, keeping the laughs coming as the action becomes more atrocious, they'd really have something. However, it's typical for writers of this kind of satire to strike a jocular mood only to punish the audience for its unfeeling laughter, and so it is here. Ido, taking matters into his own hands, invades Ogoro's house and holds his wife and son prisoner. The situation devolves into a tit-for-tat series of rapes and dismemberments, a numbing series of repetitions designed to instruct us that violence solves nothing. What begins as a cheeky, if derivative, spoof reveals its high-minded intentions and ends up a sluggish lesson in the obvious. Noda also directed, and his staging of the early scenes has considerable sketch comedy verve, with actors leaping from role to role, creating another grotesque character every few seconds. (The production, which comes from England, features three Caucasian British actors and Noda himself, principally as Mrs. Ogoro.) Glyn Pritchard, in particular, delivers a hair-raising turn as a speed-demon cop with jocular, troglodyte attitudes about women, and Clive Mendus is a prime study in fatuity, first as the inspector and, later, as the host of a television cooking show. Noda is striking as Ogoro's wife, who gradually becomes enamored of her captor. The role of Ido is filled by Kathryn Hunter, a daredevil technician who buries herself in the role, bringing surprising inflections to each line. The actress' virtuosity works against the character she is playing, however. Ido is supposed to be an everyman who discovers his inner savage; Hunter makes him oddly androgynous, and her actor-ish vocal delivery calls attention to every word she says. We should identify with Ido, becoming more uncomfortable as he sheds his civilized veneer. Hunter makes him into a curio, something to be regarded from a distance. It's a brave performance, but a wrong-headed one. The production design is right on the money, however, especially Miriam Buether's sleek setting, defined by an upstage Mylar wall that, when front-lit, acts like a mirror, and when back-lit, reveals hidden depths, containing the green outline of a pagoda. These now-you-see-it-now-you-don't tricks are aided by Christoph Wagner's lighting design (based on Rick Fisher's original), which also lends an ironic Technicolor glow to the on-stage cruelties. Buether's costumes are spot-on, and Paul Arditti's sound design paces the action with bits of Japanese pop music, an orientalized arrangement of Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, and bits of Madame Butterfly. In the end, however, The Bee suffers from a failure of imagination. The opening scenes, familiar as they are, have the caustic, take-no-prisoners attitude of real satire. But the piece retreats, all too easily, into a solemn lecture on man's inhumanity to man. The takeaway from The Bee is that violence is really, really bad; if that's news to you, make a beeline to Japan House.--David Barbour 
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