Just back from a Noh and Kyogen performance, in which a Japanese theater company reproduced the first Noh and Kyogen plays ever witnessed by westerners, in the late 19th C. in Japan. (Plays that have continued in the repetoire since then, so they're not revivals.) Similar to most of the traditional Asian theater I've seen, the notable difference between Noh and western theater is in the stylized nature of gesture and the subtle differences of interpretation the actors bring to ritualized roles. Like Chinese opera, Noh actors are also singers and dancers; every movement and syllable is prescribed and individual effort is perfected within narrow limits. It's about depth, not breadth. Kyogen is the comic side of Noh, and the Japanese folks around me were chuckling through that one. Noh is a spare form of theater, with little on the stage, but one of the plays tonight was about a group of soldiers fighting a spider-spirit. The play is famous, the production notes said, for "the throwing of the spiderwebs." And justly so. The actor who plays the spider tosses handful after handful of toothpick-thin rice paper streamers over the actors he's fighting, and eventually over the audience. It shimmers in the white stage lights as the soldiers pursue him around the stage, and makes a whooshing sound as everyone gets tangled up in it. It's a short play, but the effect is magical.