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Tradition With A Wry Twist

Nakamura Shichinosuke, left, and his father, Kanzaburo, perform at Lincoln Center in "Renjishi," about a lion who teaches his cub courage. (By Stephanie Berger -- Lincoln Center For The Performing Arts)

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"Night of the Living Dead," suggests a smiling Kantaro, who is also a popular television and film actor in Japan. "Zombie."

"I can make those kinds of films into Kabuki," Kantaro says. "I want to do it from midnight till the first train starts running in the early morning. I'd have blood spurt on the audience. I'd call it 'Midnight Kabuki.' "

"Comics," adds Shichinosuke -- who appeared in the film "The Last Samurai" with Tom Cruise -- suggesting absurd and gruesome manga stories about cannibals who gain special powers when they consume human flesh.

"Kabuki is already violent, very dark," Kantaro says. "There's no light in the Edo period, no electricity, night is very dark, there's only moonlight -- and on nights without moonlight, there's only stars and lots of spirits."

Will their father accept these ideas as legitimate Kabuki?

"I haven't talked to my father about it," he says, raising his index finger to his lips. "Shhh. It's a secret."

And so the sons take up the tradition and the change -- and the risk.

"I try to teach them exactly as I was taught," says Kanzaburo. "I don't like distorting. But it's like the telephone game -- the same things always have to come out differently."

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