A conversation between SUMO playwright Lisa Sanaye Dring, director Ralph B. Peña, cultural and martial arts consultant James Yaegashi and Director of Artistic Development Gabriel Greene.

GG: Lisa, when did your connection to sumo begin? 

LSD: I first saw sumo as a kid. I'm half Japanese, fourth generation from Hawaii, so it was around but I didn't watch it all the time. A month after my mom passed away, I took a trip to Japan and I watched sumo there. It healed me in many ways; it brought me back to life. It reminded me how spirituality can live inside the everyday, inside of something so ferocious, which I had never seen in American culture. It was a paradigm-breaking experience for me. I didn't really understand what I was seeing in terms of the ritual and the respect for the craft. It stayed with me for a long time. 

GG: And how did that experience give rise to this story? 

LSD: I applied for a MacDowell residency with this idea, and I also started developing it in the East West Players’ playwrights group. I realized this story was my attempt to understand men and to love men. I didn't really grow up with men. And I also find that America creates a space where Asian men have to prove their masculinity to even exist. I wanted to create a place that Asian men could just be men and be strong and not have to deal with the attacks upon their identity that inherently come with living in America. 

GG: One of the things I love about this play is that it occupies so many different theatrical spaces: naturalism, playful pageantry and blood- and sweat-drenched sporting event. Your language manages to encompass all of those arenas. 

LSD: I've always done hyper-theatrical work. I have a hunch that I’m one of many Los Angeles-based theatre makers who are always trying to prove ourselves against Hollywood: what can theatre do that film can't? One thing that theatre does which other mediums generally don’t is create spaces for embodied, elevated language. I’m also looking at aggression and the beauty of power in a body, and there are times in this piece where I’m trying to strip the language of its loquacious poetic values. What is poetry when language is spare and more cutting? I think the most beautiful poetry is that which points to silence, so I'm trying to create moments that let the actors’ bodies do what might otherwise happen with language. 

GG: Ralph, you came on board for the DNA Series reading of SUMO in July 2021. What drew you to the project? 

RP: When you sent me the script, I read it and thought, “I don't know how to do this play” – which is what drew me to it. I love what Lisa created. I'm especially interested in the parallel stories of the physical and the spiritual. 

GG: And your interest also resulted in the Playhouse’s first co-production with Ma-Yi Theater Company, which you’ve led so beautifully for decades. 

RP: Ma-Yi is a New York-based non-profit theatre; we focus on producing and developing new plays by Asian American playwrights. For the last 20 years, we've really focused on New York-based playwrights, but now we're widening that net to invite Asian American playwrights from all over the country to become part of the Ma-Yi family. That's a new initiative of Ma-Yi that will have its own programmatic life, apart from the work we’re doing in New York. 

GG: How much familiarity did you have with the subject matter? 

RP: I knew very little about sumo, so I really had to study. Two years in, I still don’t know enough, which is why we brought on James and Chelsea [Pace], and James specifically, to help us navigate the way we create or represent specific aspects of Japanese culture on an American stage. 

JY: When Ralph asked me, “Do you know anybody who knows about sumo?” I was like, “Yeah, me!” I was born and raised in Japan. Sumo was a part of my everyday life, my childhood heroes were sumo wrestlers. I would wrestle with my dad; when I was little, we would go to the park, draw a circle in the sand and do sumo. That's the equivalent of playing catch in the U.S. It's very much a part of me. I just love that Lisa, an American playwright, decided to write a play that’s set entirely in Japan with Japanese characters. I’m fully Japanese and fully American; I’m uniquely equipped to bridge the American imagination with the essence of sumo. 

GG: It’s a crucial distinction to make, I think – capturing the essence without feeling the need to replicate it exactly. 

RP: For me, this idea of “authenticity” is such a multifaceted discussion that can’t be done justice with just a couple of paragraphs. What I can say is that SUMO is an American play, written by an American playwright, inviting American audiences to see our representation of a highly ritualized and revered Japanese sport. It's a culturally-specific story, and our job is to tell it as respectfully as we can. A Japanese citizen watching this play will not see our work as authentic. For safety reasons, we have to modify what we do onstage. It will approximate a traditional dohyō, but we are using different materials to prevent injury to the actors. The primary intent of this play is to tell a deeply human story, and sumo is the lens we use to see that humanity. 

LSD: It's a complex question. It’s interesting for me because I'm also writing about men and I'm not one, so I feel like I'm reaching into the “other” in that capacity in a much different way. I think art can be very beautiful when you’re reaching into the other with humility and compassion. But the problem is that it’s been done carelessly and with colonizing motivations/implications in the past. That is not the intent here and we are trying to represent this community with care. I'm hopeful that this piece will add more grammar to the language that we are trying to build, to ask, “How do we tell stories with each other respectfully and in a way that is healthy and empowering for our culture and for the people we're representing, given the constraints of the form?” 

I want to add that the search for replication, or lack of essentializing, is important when a play is rooted in a mass cultural trauma. Historically, we in the AAPI theatre community are usually invited to tell stories from our home lands when it teaches about a massive traumatic event. This piece is doing something different in that we aren’t proving our humanity by demonstrating our cultural pain. We are leading with our strength. 

GG: One of the big collisions in this play is between sumo as a spiritual, sacred tradition, and also a high-stakes contemporary sport that depends on money and sponsorships. Can you talk about those warring impulses? 

JY: The wrestlers are massive, massive figures in Japanese culture. A lot of times you’ll hear that it's the national sport, but it’s more than that. Sumo is what’s called Kokugi, which literally means “national art.” It's important to people; it’s very much tied to their sense of who they are. Also, sumo as a profession is a spectacle. People go, just like we do with Major League Baseball or the NFL, to watch this competition as an entertainment. 

LSD: In some ways I'm talking about capitalism. But I don't think it's a binary; I don't think it's capitalism versus the spirit. I think western religions have defined transcending the body as the peak of spirituality, but Shinto – which is the basis of sumo – is really pagan: you pray to mountain gods and you have the spirits of the land and spirits of water. Embodiment is a spiritual activity, a spiritual practice, and sumo is emblematic of that corporeal devotional form. 

And this relates to capitalism because just as sumo troubles our ideas of what is sacred (spirit) and profane (body), it can also introduce the idea that something which is highly entertaining, spectacle-driven and commercial can also be sacred. 

JY: To Lisa’s point about sumo’s spirituality and physicality, there is such a deep tradition of the body signifying a deeper meaning, which is expressed in a lot of the ritualized motions that the wrestlers go through every time they're on the dohyō. It's also a wonderful opportunity to explore some other way of considering the body than we have in our Western mindsets. In the West, we think of strength in terms of the body as a reverse triangle. It's all top-heavy, which goes hand in hand with the fact that we're so caught up in our heads. In Japan and Eastern Asia, the ideal is actually a triangle: the strength of the body and spirit lies in the center and lower portion of your body. Look at the statues of the Buddha; they’ve got huge bellies. 

GG: What do you hope that audiences will come away feeling? 

RP: I hope they’ll be able to come away with a little bit of understanding of what sumo is all about, and to come away from it feeling more curious. But I also want the audience to be moved by the very human story that Lisa has written. I hope they end up caring deeply about every single one of these characters. 

LSD: I want to make space for people to feel things that I didn't expect. I want to invite people in to the conversation about how masculinity is comprised without being didactic. We are telling a story about someone trying to become a man inside of the sport, to become a champion, to challenge the structures that have been imposed on him. 

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