PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

This study discusses the narrative strategy and ethics of power in the wayang wong performance of the Kresna Duta play. This play is oriented toward history, myth, tradition, and convention in Javanese society as a manifestation, existence, representation, and visualization of the struggle for the values ​​of truth and untruth. How does the scriptwriter (director) compose narrative elements to play the discourse of power in Javanese culture that are interrelated in the performance, as a problem that needs to be solved? This article aims to formulate the scriptwriter's (director's) strategy in composing narrative elements to obtain actual, relevant, logical, contextual, and quality criteria and to formulate the concept of ethics of power depicted in the play. Creswell's (2009) qualitative descriptive method is a basis for analyzing all elements that build the narrative structure in performing arts and presenting them according to the reality of the production of the Kresna Duta play. Darmoko's (2017) narrative strategy to analyze the process of the cultural output and Anderson's theory of power in Javanese culture (1990) is supported by Suseno's (1993) concept of ethics of power to analyze the resistance between the discourse of truth and untruth. This article concludes that the screenwriter (director) produced the play Kresna Duta based on the power of imagination, intuitive sensitivity, intellectuality, and understanding of cultural codes. The power of truth contained in Kresna, the existence of Pandawa, can destroy the power of untruth in Duryudana, the existence of Kurawa.