The Waseda Shôgekikjô (Waseda Little Theater), also active in the mid-1960s, was dominated by one strong personality: Suzuki Tadashi (1939-). This was commonplace for all the angura groups that survived for a decade or more. In the case of [Kara Jûrô’s Jôkyô Gekijô/Situation Theater and Waseda Shôgekijô] this phenomenon takes what may be called an extreme form, for at a later stage their names were changed to include the name of the leader. Situation Theater became Kara-gumi (Kara Troupe) in 1989 and Waseda Shôgekijô changed to SCOT. While Kara later rejected the west and concentrated the touring activities of his group elsewhere, Suzuki Tadashi became such an international figure with his connections in the United States and Europe that he gave his company a name that is an English-sounding acronym of a full English name: Suzuki Company of Toga.

In 1961 Suzuki and Betsuyaku Minoru (1937-), both recent graduates of Waseda University, founded a group which they called Jiyû Butai (Free Stage). This partnership of director and playwright lasted until 1969 and gave a stamp to Jiyû Butai and its successor group Waseda Shôgekijô that Suzuki felt progressively less comfortable with. Suzuki is known, like Kara, for his emphasis on the centrality of the actor and especially the actor’s body, but during this early phase of his career his fortunes were bound up with a disciplined playwright, Betsuyaku, who wrote scripts where every word counted. Betsuyaku was to later characterize the differences between them as opposite conceptions of what was universal: to Suzuki it was the movement of the body; to Betsuyaku the more locally based a play was, the more likely it was to attain universality and he was concerned in his plays to express the “hushed murmurings of members of small communities.” Although these two strong personalities went their separate ways after 1969, before that their collaboration was very fruitful and it resulted in two events that were important in the theatre history of the period. The first was Jiyû Butai’s production of Betsuyaku’s Zô (Elephant) in 1962, the “play that launched the postmodern theater movement,” and the second was the awarding of the prestigious Kishida Prize for Drama in 1968. Betsuyaku was the second of his generation to be recognized in this way.

[Description of The Elephant]

In March 1966 Suzuki, Betsuyaku, and an actor named Ono Seki, who had played one of the two protagonists in Zô, reorganized Jiyû Butai and renamed it Waseda Shôgekijô, which quickly became one of the leading angura [underground] companies of the late 1960s. Much of the considerable attention that Waseda Shôgekijô received in the media came from the combination of Suzuki’s powerful direction, Betsuyaku’s provoking dramas and Ono’s intense acting.

[Description of The Little Match Girl]

Split of Betsuyaku and Suzuki Tadashi:

Like Kara Jûrô and like other directors at the time, Suzuki was convinced of the centrality of the actor in theatre, and he had an actress in Waseda Shôgekijô whose stage presence was quite exceptional. Shiraishi Kayoko (1941-) had joined the company in 1967 and two years later Suzuki built a whole program around her. He entitled it Gekiteki naru Mono o Megutte I (variously translated as On the Dramatic Passions, On the Dramatic, In Search of the Dramatic). As the title indicates, Suzuki was seeking to explore the roots of what was dramatic, and he chose to do this through one actor who acted in a series of scenes from previous classics. Shiraishi’s vocal range and riveting powers of expression astonished her audiences, but it was the second of these collage programs, in 1970, that brought her to national attention as the foremost actress in contemporary drama. The collage consisted of ten scenes taken from two kabuki plays by the nineteenth century decadent playwright, Tsuruya Nanboku IV, a Shimpa classic, and a dramatization of a story by Izumi Kyôka. All centered on a woman who had been grievously wronged. Shiraishi expressed the uncontained feelings of these women -- feeling of rage, disbelief, sorrow, vengeance -- with a tortured depth of emotion that engaged the whole being of members of the audience in a way not known before.

Shiraishi was compared to Okuni, the legendary founder of Kabuki, thus suggesting a link, no doubt welcome to Suzuki, with Japanese theater before its seventeenth-century institutionalization. Suzuki at this time was developing his own theory of actor training and he was consciously looking back beyond the time when theatre in Japan began divesting itself of its religious function of mediating between the gods and man. From the earliest origins of theatre in Japan foot stamping has been an important part of ritualized performances and Suzuki built up a theory of acting, which claimed that the whole body of the actor could be trained to produce emotional and spiritual powers of expression through contact with the earth. By putting his actors through extremely rigorous training of the lower part of the body, Suzuki developed a highly disciplined company capable of communication with their audiences at an intense level. What became known as the Suzuki method led to workshops abroad, mainly in the United States.

As Suzuki looked more and more to early forms of Japanese classical theatre, he became convinced that urbanization might have been responsible for Japanese theater losing its past intensely dramatic nature and he took his company, at least for the summer months, to a village called Toga high in the mountains near Toyama City. Here from 1976, away from the distractions and irrelevances of city life, the company lived together, trained together and developed new productions under Suzuki’s direction. Waseda Shôgekijô fans showed themselves very willing to make the eight-hour train and bus journey from Tokyo to Toga and the Toga festival, founded in 1982, consistently attracted capacity audiences. Increasingly the complex of traditional farmhouses and later, Isozaki Arata buildings became an international theater center, with companies and individual actors from Europe and the United States participating in both the training program and Toga Festival productions. Suzuki turned progressively to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare for his repertory. Apart from providing him with what he considered valid drama for his actors, often set by him in a new context (for example, King Lear in an old-people’s home), knowledge of the classics among the various nationalities that make up the audiences at Toga enabled him to pioneer a remarkable series of bilingual productions, where Japanese and English-speaking actors acted together delivering their lines in their own language.

Notes on Ôta Shôgo from Brian Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre (Japan Library, 2002), pp. 180-85.
Ôta Shôgo (1939-) preferred to base his drama not on the 20% of the time when humans give utterance, but the 80% when they are not and were having thoughts that were not to be communicated to the outside world. His plays had minimal dialogue, and in the case of Mizu no Eki (The Water Station, 1981) none at all. The action was extremely slow, on the assumption that things normally missed would be revealed. New concepts of the use of (apparently empty) space on the stage were also opened up by the interminable time it seemed to take characters to move towards or away from each other, and Ôta acknowledged his dept to Noh performance. Ôta admits no debt to butoh dance but has himself assumed some significance in the simultaneity with which the new dance and his form of theater developed. Watching butoh and an Ôta play can be a similarly draining experience as the outcome that the audience expects from the agonizingly slow movements of the actors is either denied it or subverted in an unforeseen way.