Last night, at Theater X (Cai) in Ryogoku, Tokyo, we finished a short season of plays I'd written, and eight of us -- Japanese cast and staff, with myself as director -- leave tonight on an adventure to present stagings in Sydney and Adelaide. I call this tour an adventure because doing the two plays, "The Reporters" and "Tomoko's Story," in Japanese in Australia is an untried, if not downright foolhardy, undertaking.
Though I am working with superb actors, the experience has brought to mind some of the ways in which the process of creating theater in Japan is different from that in the West -- different, and yet, in essence, the same. A comparison may cast interesting light on Japanese modes of social expression.
Let's start with the way in which actors build their characters in a play. The key to this process lies in the word "motivation." Actors must discover the motivation that drives their characters to behave as they do. If this is not found from within the actors themselves, the acting will be facile and false.