Japanese Director to Bring Wordless ‘Water Station’ to L.A.

A despairing procession of people, some literally carrying their lives on their backs, enter and cross the stage, pausing at a water pump.

They drink from the fountain. They wash. They fight. Or they make love. Then they continue on, leaving the stage. Nobody speaks.

This is the world of Shogo Ohta’s 100-minute play without words, “The Water Station,” to be presented at the Japan America Theater on Saturday (8 p.m.) and Sunday (2 p.m.) by Ohta’s theater troupe, Tenkei Genkijo.

Dressed in a dark linen suit and smoking Peace brand cigarettes, its author sits in a severely designed, stainless-steel Tokyo cafe, attempting, with visible effort, to explain his work.

“I get confused when asked about influences on my work,” says Ohta, an intensely intellectual but gentle man in his late 40s. “People bring up Samuel Beckett’s work, and John Cage’s ‘Silence,’ but I have been influenced by a lot of different things. . . .”

Even the company’s name, sometimes translated into English as the Theater of Transformation, prompts a 10-minute discussion with his translator, with this outcome: “That name doesn’t fit the theater.”

In fact, Ohta’s troupe and plays are difficult to categorize in terms of Japanese theater. Other than the almost excruciatingly slow, stylized stage movement that he favors, and the intense concentration and physical control of his disciplined actors, Ohta’s work doesn’t refer back to traditional Japanese theater forms, such as Noh, at all.

“The Water Station” contains some music but no dialogue. In creating the piece in 1981, Ohta says he was exploring silence rather than words. “I was interested in the human body, in the actors’ corporeality and their breathing as a way of expressing ideas.”

In other interviews, Ohta has related “The Water Station” to his childhood. When he was 6, in 1945, he and his parents left Beijing on foot in a long, long procession of Japanese, everyone carrying all that they could of their possessions to Tianjin (and abandoning almost everything along the way), where a train waited to take them to a Japan-bound ship.

Now he says: “Although that was a very shocking experience, it was a slip of the tongue to relate it to ‘The Water Station.’ I don’t think there is a direct relationship.”

Ohta has created a substantial body of work for his actors, who rehearse and perform in their own theater space in Tokyo. His 1977 “Komachi Fuden” won Japan’s major playwriting award, the Kunio Kishida prize. His new collection of essays and plays will include the text for “The Water Station.” Without dialogue, the script is a description of movement--which is exactly what Ohta began with.

“First, I wrote out the entire composition--who is coming out, in what way are they drinking the water, or using it; a description of behavior, and also a description of character.

“I also included words that didn’t describe the action but gave the actors insight into it--words of mine, and sometimes quotes from other people’s writing. That was our starting point.”

Ohta’s actors--all of whom have remarkably strong-featured, expressive faces--were encouraged to collaborate in the process. Once he created a stylized movement framework for them, he let them discover their characters within that framework.

“Rather than forcing them, I let them do their own acting in the piece. Then, during rehearsal, I eliminated excessive movement and moments. Elimination was very important to this work. The finished product was very different from the work we started out with. And I can’t say whom it really belongs to.”

Ohta’s troupe, almost 20 years old, has gained much recognition abroad. But at home it has been supported only by its individual members’ desire to create. Japan, newly affluent, lags far behind the West in institutional support for the arts. There is almost no government or corporate funding, and donations are not tax-deductible.

“Here, most theater actors quit at about 35, because they cannot carry on economically. And the audience is in its 20s. I’d like to change that, so that the performers can continue and the age of the audience can come up.”

Ohta pauses to light another cigarette. Again he is asked how he would describe his work. He folds his arms, closes his eyes, lowers his head. It is early evening and there are no other customers left in the dark cafe. It is very quiet. At long last he opens his eyes and looks up.

“There is the English expression, ‘God is in the details,’ ” he says. “I’m not sure of the meaning of that, but in my plays I try hard in each detail to encompass the whole of human life.”