Theatrical experiences don't get much more intimate than at the Umegaoka Box in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward. The room-size home of the Rinko Gun theater company is barely four meters from front to back (including the floor-level acting area) and 15 meters across, meaning there's no place for either the 40 audience members or the actors to hide.
In a leaflet handed out at the door, Yoji Sakate, the leader of Rinko Gun, described this space now hosting "Zou (Elephant)" as being like "a modern shelter." The description is appropriate, not only for the look of the place but also for this play, whose central characters are survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
"Zou" is an early masterpiece by one of the country's leading contemporary dramatists, 66-year-old Minoru Betsuyaku, whose 120-odd works are generally categorized as "theater of the absurd." Sakate's decision to stage this play -- written in the year he was born, 1962 -- was surely informed by its relevance to the current Japanese political situation, specifically the widely regretted but apparently imminent dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces of this constitutionally war-renouncing nation to an area of conflict.