Bunraku puppets are up to three feet tall. They are little men or women with mobile limbs, hands, and mouths; each puppet is moved by three visible men, who surround it, support it, accompany it. The master puppeteer controls the puppet's upper body and right arm; his face is uncovered, smooth, light, impassive, cold as “a white onion which has just been washed” (Basho). His two assistants are dressed in black; cloths cover their faces. One, gloved but with his thumb left uncovered, holds a large, stringed, scissors-like extension, with which he moves the puppet's left arm and hand; the other, crouching, supports the puppet's body and steadies its course. These men move along a shallow trench, which leaves their bodies visible. The scenery is behind them, as in the theatre. On a platform to one side are the musicians and narrators; their role is to express the text (the way one squeezes a fruit).

The Japanese theatrical face is not painted (powdered), it is written. This unforeseen movement occurs: though painting and writing have the same original instrument, the brush, it is not painting, however, which seduces writing with its decorative style, its sprawling, caressing touch, its representative space (as no doubt would have happened with us in the West, for whom the civilized future of a function is always its esthetic ennoblement); on the contrary, it is the act of writing which subjugates the pictorial gesture, so that painting is always only writing. This theatrical face (masked in Noh, drawn in Kabuki, artificial in Bunraku) is made from two substances: the white of the paper, the black of the inscription (reserved for the eyes).

There seem to be four major theatrical traditions in Southeast Asia: the Eastern, strongly influenced by Chinese theatre and found in the coastal region of Vietnam; the Southern, previously Hindu-Buddhist and now Moslem, covering parts of Indonesia and Malaysia; the Central, Hindu-Buddhist, found in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia; and the Western, more strictly Buddhist than the Central tradition and found chiefly in Burma and Ceylon. The traditional theatres of the Southern, Central, and Western areas share many features: they are commonly nightlong performances, done outdoors on a temporary bamboo stage, accompanied by a mainly percussive orchestra; they use either live actors or puppets; and dialogue and action are usually improvised around Indian epics and religious stories.

Yet there are important differences even within the geographical areas. For example, in the South, shadow puppets are comparatively small, with articulated arms, and operated by a single puppeteer, or dalang. In the Central area, puppets are large, not articulated, and operated by a number of dancers; the dalang sits at the side of the screen narrating the story.

In contemporary Western society, theatre has become primarily a source of entertainment and sometimes of social criticism; its older function of articulating and instilling prevailing values is now performed by the mass media and specialized educational and propaganda institutions. In Indonesia, however, and elsewhere in Asia where mass media and educational facilities are less developed and private reading is not a widely established habit, popular drama still transmits sociopolitical ideals between the court (or city) and the countryside, and reinforces religious tradition. While some of its communicative role is now shared with movies and other new media, live theatre is still a vital and popular teacher.

In Java the Wayang Kulit, or shadow-puppet theatre, epitomizes the traditional Javanese world view; it has functioned as an art form, a religious rite, and a medium of instruction for more than a thousand years.

The Ma'yong theatre of Malaysia, though little known outside the province of Kelantan where it once flourished, is a rare example of a court entertainment which changed into a popular performance within the relatively brief period of about fifty years. Ma'yong, now performed only two or three times a year by wives of rice farmers in the remote villages of Kelantan, carries little evidence of its court origins; however, the magical propitiatory function which seems to have been associated with it from the beginning is still recognized. Furthermore, Ma'yong is unique in that all the leading roles, both male and female, are taken by women, while only the parts of the servant-clowns, or peran (generally two in a given play), are played by men. This introduction to Ma'yong is based on a three-month expedition I made in 1968 to record this theatre and its music on video tape.

Many Indian traditional theatre performances are connected with different Hindu religious cults and deities and performed by devotees. Drawing upon a common body of religious literature—the Puranas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana—these theatres enact the individual episodes especially meaningful to a given deity, cult, and, sometimes, region. Since they are most often performed within a religious context, they require ritual cleanliness and other devotional observances. These, the most overtly religious actions, may occur at the opening or closing or may suffuse the entire performance, in which case the performance itself is a votive offering.

The main rituals connected with Indian traditional theatre begin in the dressing room hours before a performance. Thus, Kathakali actors begin their makeup procedures with a silent prayer for success.

Saw a folk opera last night. The form is called Chavittu Natakam, and this particular one is about St. George and the dragon. They give absolutely no attention to production,finesse. They miss cues, they look around “out of character,” the curtain keeps sticking, the two light men run up from the pit where they have been operating the spotlights seemingly at random and carry a banner across the stage, then scamper back down. A photographer walks right onto the stage to take his pictures. Mr. Vasudevan, the PR man for the Kathakali, sat next to me. The only thing that seemed to disturb him was when the lighting guys carried their banner wearing dhotis and Western shirts.

It seems more like European opera than Kathakali. It is done indoors in the auditorium of a music academy. Proscenium stage, but no consideration for the formality of a proscenium situation.

Mask plays, one principal form of traditional theatre in Korea, were developed during the late Yi dynasty (around the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) from a pure folk origin. Since the Confucian ruling class of the Yi dynasty ignored or tried to suppress all forms of theatrical entertainment, these plays have followed the tastes of popular audiences and thus reflect commoners’ resentment towards the privileged classes of those days. They were performed in the open air and usually lasted throughout the night. Among them the most representative forms still extant are the Yangju Pyol Sandae mask play and the Pongsan mask dance.

Mask plays consist of ten scenes or so, very loosely linked. All the characters—every Korean mask play has more than twenty—wear masks, which differ according to role: there are twenty-two masks in the Yangju Pyol Sandae and twenty-six in the Pongsan.

When European theatre was introduced to Japan, Kabuki (including its bastard offspring Shimpa—Kabuki-style modern theatre) was practically the only theatre there was, and it consequently became the referent for all theatrical endeavor. Kabuki actors and Kabuki language, Kabuki gestures and Kabuki notions—there was nothing else. When in the early 1920s Aoyama Sugisaku directed a play using the vernacular, he was met with praise from some quarters, contempt from others, but amazement from all. It was thus natural for Osanai Kaoru to see Kabuki as a vehicle for modern theatre. In a lecture delivered in Moscow, Osanai declared:

One recently published book on Kabuki is called Kabuki: The Popular Theatre. But today Kabuki supports its claim to popularity mainly with body counts: each year Kabuki audiences are six times larger than those for all modern theatre (Shingeki) productions combined. Kabuki's devotees claim that Kabuki audiences enjoy and appreciate what they see, while Shingeki's adherents are firmly convinced that they do not. Whatever the case, we can be sure that large numbers of people do not go spontaneously to a Kabuki theatre for a good night's entertainment, that Kabuki is not supported by revenue from individual ticket sales, and that the scions of Kabuki themselves are worried that their audiences do not understand what goes on onstage.

In 1969 Tokyo's National Theatre raised the price of tickets sold at the box office from 1,800 yen ($5.00) to 2,000 yen ($5.56) while at the same time giving considerable discounts, sometimes more than fifty percent, to package audiences.