Satoshi Ago has been in the news lately following his appointment as artistic director of the small but pioneering Kyoto theater, Atelier Gekken. Since long before that, however, the playwright, actor and director has been renowned for his thought-provoking "theater of mechanical reproduction."

Strongly influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Ago took that name he gives to his approach to drama from the German philosopher's 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Indeed, in his trilogy "Passages," shown from 2012 to 2014, he attempted to demonstrate his belief derived from Benjamin that "theater is fundamentally reproducible."

In the final part of the trilogy, for instance, Ago, 38, dramatized Benjamin's last 30 minutes of life before he killed himself while fleeing from the Nazis — except that there were no actors on stage. Instead, audiences were invited into the black-box space Ago set up at Atelier Gekken to watch newsreels and handle objects including letters, texts, a suitcase, shoes and other memorabilia. Hence each "performance," with a different audience, was a reproduction of the others.