For these actors, the answer is 'Noh'

Noh performers train their whole lives. Haruhisa Kawamura of Kyoto's Kawamura Noh Theater played his first stage role at age 3, and the first of many leading roles at 10.

"My practice," Mr. Kawamura says in rapid-fire Japanese, interpreted by Professor Rubin, "would always center on a specific play. I'd work on the dance, singing, of that play. In middle school, I was in the choruses. This is in fifth or sixth grade. Then the training gets serious.... I went to different teachers to learn different instruments. Every day I was learning something. It becomes impossible to measure the time [spent training] because it's not hours each day, it's the whole time. Even now, when I'm teaching, it's a kind of practice."

"Kawamura has everything inside his head," Rubin says. "He could recite a whole play at the drop of a hat." Kawamura says he has memorized 200 Noh plays.

Professional Noh actors are taught "mouth to mouth," or by imitating their teachers exactly, Moore says. "This is changing," she adds, "due to technology. Now you can buy an audiotape of a Noh play and practice with that. But if you are a professional, you don't use recordings."

Noh actors have long careers. Because actors are masked, a white-haired man can play a beautiful young woman, or the part of a general by a young boy - or girl.

Not many girls perform in professional Noh dramas, but Kawamura has been training his daughter Haruna since she was 2. Now she's 10, and accomplished enough to take parts in the scenes her father performs when he travels the world doing demonstrations. If she wants to, says Kawamura, she can have a place in his company, but only if she continues training. "I don't know," he muses. "She is interested in ballet."

If Haruna does continue in the theater, she will be in a minority of performers. "There are about 2,000 Noh performers in the world, and they all live in Japan," says Moore. About 2 percent of them, 40 or so, are women. "It's changing very slowly," she says.

But, Moore adds, there is a very large number of amateur Noh players in Japan - both male and female - who study for years and perform Noh scenes at recitals. Some Noh players also live in the United States, such as those associated with Moore's theater.

"We have to have discipline to do our kind of theater," Moore says. "You have to train your body and voice. Women, in general, have been willing to put in the years it takes." In her San Francisco company, at least, "We've always had more women than men."

You may never have seen a Noh performance, but you may have seen a Noh mask. The masks are often in museum collections. The oldest masks are carved from blocks of Japanese cypress that were soaked in water for five or six years first. The masks are greatly revered, and families of performers pass them down through the generations. (Haruhisa Kawamura, the Noh actor featured in this article, owns a 600-year-old mask.) There is even a special room in Noh theaters called "the mirror room," where performers go to don their masks.

Actors are able to show a range of emotions by tilting their masks to catch the light just so, or put them in shadow. But masked Noh actors can't see very well because the eye holes are very small. One of the four pillars on every Noh stage is called the "eye-fixing pillar." Performers use it to figure out where they are on stage so they won't fall off!

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