For a show in which the majority of actors spend most of their time wearing only mawashi, Sumo is extremely well dressed. Directed by Ralph B. Peña, Lisa Sanaye Dring’s exploration of Japan’s national sport — also very much an art form and a sacred Shinto ritual — lands at the Public Theater in a co-production with Ma-Yi Theater Company after an initial West Coast run at La Jolla Playhouse in 2023, and it looks and sounds commensurately polished. Aesthetically, this is the result of many dedicated hands honing a highly specialized piece over time: Whether it’s the physical dynamism and detail provided by sumo consultant James Yaegashi and his co-fight director Chelsea Pace, or the pulse-raising taiko drumming performed live by Shih-Wei Wu (who also wrote the show’s taiko score), or the lush projections by Hana S. Kim — which unfold like ancient watercolors across the sliding back walls and the round sumo-ring floor of Wilson Chin’s set — the sensory landscape of Sumo is carefully and caringly crafted, rich with both real-world particulars and spiritual heft. Wrapped in such a garment, Dring’s play itself can sometimes feel a bit like a junior wrestler attempting to wear a tsuna, the ceremonial 30-pound belt awarded to sumo wrestlers when they reach yokozuna, the sport’s highest rank. It’s not that the writing lacks muscle or ambition, but it’s also clearly still growing, and its dips into flatness or formula are periodically outshone by the specifics of its living setting.
When it comes to story structure, there’s more than a little Joseph Campbell — by way of George Lucas — embedded in Dring’s script. Her hero is Akio (Scott Keiji Takeda), a young wrestler who’s just been accepted into a sumo heya, or stable, in contemporary Tokyo by its master, the oyakata. Oyakata are traditionally retired wrestlers who’ve moved into the position of coaches and trainers, though, as Dring’s characters point out, many leave the actual training to their deputies while they live the ritzier managerial life of wining, dining, and drafting prospective winners. “When oyakata is gone — which is always — ōzeki is the boss,” says So (Michael Hisamoto), a sweet dreamer who’s only a couple of ranks above Akio. Ōzeki denotes a king of the hill, only one rank below the top. Played with gruff impenetrability and a thinly veiled sadistic streak by David Shih, this big dog’s name is Mitsuo, but no one uses names in the heya — only ranks. “In sumo,” we’re told by a trio of narrating Shinto priests (played with mischievous shape-shifting energy by Kris Bona, Paco Tolson, and Viet Vo), “rank is everything.” Sometimes beautifully illustrative, Kim’s projections are also practical teaching aids: We learn sumo’s ranking system pronto, along with plenty of other helpful vocabulary (the wrestlers are rikishi; a tournament is a honbasho).
Akio — a prickly, ambitious kid with a short backstory that includes being abandoned by his mother — dreams of shooting up through the rankings to fame and glory. “I’m not here to be enlightened,” he scoffs at So. Instead, he longs for victories in the ring, sponsorships from Nintendo and Nissan, and — forbidden during the wrestlers’ religiously enmeshed training but somehow available to the top dogs, along with every other temptation — girls. He immediately chafes at the cleaning, fetching, and carrying duties assigned to him, and he’s as canny as he is surly. He’s got an eye for strategy, for the weaknesses in potential opponents. “Everyone’s got a soft spot,” Mitsuo tells him with a winner’s complacency, but Akio shoots back, “Yours is the shoulder. The right one. Everyone thinks it’s the knee.” This kid is less a Luke Skywalker than an Anakin: He’s talented, impatient, and hungry for power — just waiting for the Dark Side.
Perhaps this is why it can often feel difficult to forge a strong emotional investment in Sumo. As in the Star Wars prequels, we’re not following a sometimes whiny but ultimately charming, open, and courageous young hero — instead, we’ve got an always whiny, defensive, closed-off, headed-for-a-fall kind of guy on our hands. Occasionally, Dring pulls back and tries to give Akio a conscience: He feels for an open-minded, good-natured wrestler named Shinta (Earl T. Kim), who’s disgraced during a tournament and subsequently dismissed from the heya, so we know he’s not all bad. But it’s a tricky task to craft a protagonist like Akio — who’s so many parts unlikability, both his ascent and downfall so easy to predict — and keep us not so much sympathetic as simply interested. Listening to him grumble about having to clean or protest that he’s ready to fight can only drive so many scenes. And, at the same time, the play itself is attempting to straddle two horses and wobbling in the process: It can’t quite figure out whether it wants Akio’s complaining to be the signifier of his immaturity — his lack of humility and disregard for the kind of spiritual wisdom that So offers when he says, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water” — or whether it wants Akio to be a young reformer, the voice of a new and less abusive approach to an art form in which the ancient ways can be both exquisitely profound and, from a modern perspective, discriminatory and cruel.
I think Dring aspires to the latter. “I ask,” she writes in her playwright’s note, “that the mythology which has created something as glorious as sumo — governed by the most powerful goddesses, exclusionary to so many, and fundamental to shaping the consciousness of my ancestors — make space for a new sacred imagination. And I ask that our stage make space for a new kind of hero.” In traditional, professional sumo, as it’s still practiced in Japan, women are barred from the sport entirely. In diving into both its formative myths and its vexed human practices, Dring seems to be standing side by side with her own protagonist: Together, they are trying to carve out that new space she describes. Yet the shape of Akio’s character and his overfamiliar arc — especially his repetitive interactions with the menacing tempter Mitsuo — don’t provide the radical, paradigm-shifting energy Sumo is striving for.
More compelling is the play’s main subplot, which follows the relationship between Fumio (Red Concepción), a middle-ranking wrestler at the heya, and Ren (an imposing Ahmad Kamal), the hardest worker in the stable, top in the rankings underneath Mitsuo and an infinitely more humane soul. Some of Dring’s finest work happens in her exploration of the love between these two men — secretly romantic in nature — and of the wider, platonic yet intensely physical love shared by all the rikishi. As an implicit celebration of big bodies and of varying, deeply feeling masculinities, Sumo is at its most beautiful. A scene in which Akio, too guarded and grasping to join in, observes as his comrades collapse into drunken karaoke after a successful honbasho gives the play a real jolt toward that space of possibility imagined by its author — a space where human love and human joy are as sacred as any ancient ritual, where the body is not only a shrine to old gods but a home to be fully inhabited and shared, without shame, on earth.
Sumo is at the Public Theater through March 30.