Review: Wrestling With Angels and Demons in ‘Sumo'

New York Times

06-03-2025

Lisa Sanaye Dring's 'Sumo' offers New Yorkers who are little exposed to that ancient Japanese discipline an opportunity to learn about it in an atmosphere of authenticity and respect. The director Ralph B. Peña's visually splendid staging, with the athletes' nearly naked bodies deployed as living sculpture, immerses us in the pageantry and poetics of a spiritual practice that is also a sport and a big business.
But what's authentic and respectful may not always feel satisfying emotionally, and 'Sumo,' a Ma-Yi Theater Company and La Jolla Playhouse production that opened Wednesday at the Public Theater, rarely rises to the dramatic heights it seeks. For long stretches, it feels more like a fuzzy nature documentary than a play.
Not that it lacks events. In a fictional Tokyo heya, or wrestling stable, a rigid hierarchy based on competitive achievement is brutally enforced. The main enforcer is Mitsuo (David Shih), who is one tournament away from reaching the sport's highest level. Stratified beneath him are Ren (Ahmad Kamal), Shinta (Earl T. Kim), Fumio (Red Concepción) and So (Michael Hisamoto), each wearing the traditional loincloth and carrying the privilege of his respective rank — or lack thereof. The lowest man, So, spends a lot of time serving the rice and sweeping the ring.
Yet there is someone beneath even him. Naturally, that's the unranked newcomer, Akio (Scott Keiji Takeda): an 18-year-old from a troubled background who, though small by sumo standards, has dreamed of becoming a wrestler since childhood. In the way of such stories, his ambition must be humbled. As he scrubs Mitsuo clean in the tub, he scrubs himself of arrogance, pain and desire.
'You reek of need,' Mitsuo says, before violently pouring hot tea down his back.
The best plays set in the world of men's sports, like Kristoffer Diaz's 'The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,' about American wrestling, take the rituals of their milieu and the abuse of athletes within it as givens: starting points for the story, not the story itself. At most they suggest a connection to a general atmosphere of toxic masculinity or the relentless pummeling of no-holds-barred capitalism.
Dring could have taken that approach. Women are thought of as contaminants in the heya and arm candy outside it; the sponsors exert a baleful commercial pressure on the fighters. But instead, 'Sumo' puts its characters' quasi-sadistic initiations and humiliations in the context of the sport's spiritual ethos, with its echoes of Shinto purification and the foundational fight between deities representing the human and the divine.
'It's supposed to feel awful,' Ren tells Akio after dropping him to the floor as if flicking a fly. 'Parts of us must be destroyed to make way for what comes after.'
Though that didn't work for me, it certainly does for Akio. In the series of competitions designed to give structure and momentum to the otherwise static play, he rises swiftly in the rankings and thus in the other men's esteem. His spiritual growth is rockier, or so we're told, though it's hard to follow dramatic turns that are so thinly sketched. At one point I wasn't sure — and am still not sure after reading the script — whether he does wrong by throwing a match or by not throwing it.
Focus is a problem in writing that piles on too many crises in a dutiful effort to particularize each character. One wrestler leaves the heya in shame; another apparently kills himself. A gay subplot, daring in the context of Japanese sumo, is so delicately and abstractly handled it's hard to follow. We are told more about the men's in vitro feelings than we are permitted to see them in vivo.
That's not a problem with the physical production. Peña's staging, mostly within a simple 15-foot sumo ring designed by Wilson Chin, provides plenty of intense action, which the men's size and strength make almost elemental, like collisions of planets. (The fight direction is by James Yaegashi and Chelsea Pace.)
In other moments, the projections by Hana S. Kim, the lighting by Paul Whitaker and the sound by Fabian Obispo evoke the hush of a bath, the buzz of a restaurant, the clamor of competition. And throughout, the costumes by Mariko Ohigashi, whether the heavy belts worn by the wrestlers at work or their lovely robes in relaxation, tell precise and vivid stories.
Yet when you look for the souls within the clothing you find nothing as precise or vivid. That's a problem that comes with the play's virtues. Respect and delicacy, wonderful life values, are less so in drama, and Dring's framing of the work with ingratiatingly comic narration from three priests, as if her subject would otherwise be too strange for New York theatergoers, has a paradoxical effect. It makes sumo seem like a museum exhibit, trapped behind glass. Better, perhaps, just to throw us into the ring.