The Musical as Drama

their soil, the Japanese have rigged a gangway of straw mats
leading into the Treaty House. The mats and the floorboards
are to keep the soil untouched by foreign feet. There is also a
Samurai hidden under the floorboards to cut the Americans
down should they draw their guns.
The scene remains outside the hut in which the expected
book action is supposed to be occurring. Everyone is out of
sight except the Reciter—a narrative figure from the Kabuki
tradition, which is basic to the staging of the entire show. The
Reciter is far from omniscient as a narrator. He announces that
no one really knows what transpired during the meeting with
the Americans. A key scene in the plot is about to remain ob-
scure when an aged figure appears to the sound of orchestral
music, says “Pardon me” to the Reciter, and announces that he
knows what happened in the Treaty House. As a young boy he
had been looking on from a nearby tree. The number that is
now beginning will supply the information that is obscured by
the hut. The number develops into a trio when the old man’s
younger self, the Boy, climbs the tree to gain the best vantage
point, and the Samurai warrior is revealed beneath the Treaty
House—he heard everything, he says. But we never do find out
what happened in that hut. The book scene remains hidden,
and “Someone in a Tree” fails to say what happened inside the
hut. The three reporters cannot get beyond the groaning of
the occasional floorboard and the sight of some gold on the
uniforms. The singers are quite certain they have settled the
matter, however—“if it happened, I was there” is the mark of
their confidence—and they depart with no advance at all hav-
ing been made toward revealing the episode inside the hut.
The beauty of the song is that it frustrates our desire for nar-
rative completeness and substitutes the satisfaction of another
desire, a desire for lyric and musical completeness, the time of
the number. Nothing happens in the book. “It’s the fragment,
not the day” that matters in this number, “the pebble, not the
stream.” The Zen-oriented implication is that accounting for
bits of things is more important than the Western-oriented
drive for narrative closure. Yet the singing of the number does

WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 203