In telling the story of Seven Samurai (and of its own creation), the nimble enacters of Samurai 7.0 utilize screens, sticks, fronds, shadow puppetry, dance movement, and music that runs the gamut from the original doodlings of Don Dinicola and live drumming of Tamora Gooding to “Lonesome Polecat” from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (one of many variants on the number seven batted around, including the Seven Dwarfs). Kabuki and the American Western are borrowed from and mixed up. Film close-ups are simulated by blurry magnifying mirrors, and the “original enemy-on-the-horizon shot” is replicated by toy horses bobbing atop a large, arcing fan approaching the audience. There is understandable condensation: rather than the days of mayhem that save the village, supertitles list “Horses and rain,” “Horses and rain,” then “Just rain,” before the four martyred samurai take their places beneath curved, curly sticks that stand in for the sword-bearing hillocks beneath which they’re buried in the film. One of the surviving samurai remarks that the villagers didn’t even say “thank you” — which is probably how underpraised and underpaid theater artists sometimes feel.
There are small delights here and some missteps; the Shakespearean borrowing is awkward, and not all of the self-referential remarks are funny. Certainly the tongue-in-cheek piece does not begin to depict the brute, epic tale of Seven Samurai. But it doesn’t try to. What director Robinson and his co-creators want to enshrine here is physicalized imagination and the “simple skill” put forward by Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, referred to in the Samurai 7.0 epilogue, and, one hopes, not gone the way of the dodo. Or to Bowdoin.
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