Saw a performance last night of a Japanese form of theater called Kyogen, the comedic version of Noh drama. The lead actor was one of Japan's Living National Treasures; he and another company member were also, for some unaccountable reason, referred to as Intangible Cultural Assets -- I mean, you can poke them, so they're not intangible, right? But they're treasures, you can tell that. Noh and Kyogen are highly stylized forms of theater, where training and execution are paramount (this goes back to my "basebaru" post). In Kyoto I saw a ten-minute Kyogen play that had me in stitches; think slapstick ballet performed by actors with silent-screen elastic faces. The two plays last night were not as broadly funny. In fact the first was a Kyogen anomaly, a sad play, reminiscent of the Greek tragedies in the way doom is visited on a man by a god for no good reason and without recourse. The second play was in fact a comedy and starred the National Treasure's son, with his 4-year-old grandson playing the monkey. It didn't crack me up the way the one in Kyoto did. But I got a thrill from the subtlety of the various actors' personal interpretations of centuries-old stylized gestures, and from seeing a 4-year-old begin to develop his own gestural repetoire.