Revelations and Reversals

I was determined today, to try to correct my sleep cycle. So although I did wake up at 5AM, I did not go back to sleep after breakfast, as is my body's inclination. Instead I lid a wet towel down on the nasty carpet, did a yoga practice, and worked until our 11AM meeting with Okada.

Okada wanted to take us to the restaurant where a young couple at the end of the play go to on their date, to eat stuffed cabbage, but the restaurant was closed for no specified reason, so instead we walked 10 minutes to an eel place. It was very good.
(Sorry I had already taken a few bites before I remembered to take a photo... Is that gross?)
Over lunch we started to review the script and some question points we had. Since sentences in Japanese do not need to specify a subject (most of the time the subject must be assumed from the context) it can lead to many misunderstandings. Okada also depends on the ingrained ambiguity of his mother language to communicate a sense of elusiveness (indecisiveness, for example) in his characters. We only had 90 minutes together before Okada has to go to rehearsal, which was not enough time to get really into the details.

After lunch, or in fact the whole morning I'd been feeling kind of shitty. Like woozy in the stomach, and just... kind of sick of being here (here in Tokyo, here in the hotel) dealing with this environment that asks something quite different of a person than New York or California. Kind of feeling squashed. And also hearing during the day about a bus-jacking that occurred in Aichi prefecture -- some 14 year old boy tried to jack a bus with two knives. WTF? I worked for a few hours alone on the script and then met up with Dan. He was particularly chipper today, or maybe it just seemed that way because he was wearing a lime green polo shirt. Over tea and juice and a fresh enormous delicious peach we went over many of our questions in the script and also laid out a casting schema for the play, and then walked over to the New National. Here is the Koushukaido highway you have to walk along to get there.
Huge, concrete.
I really wanted to walk through the water thing at the New National. I thought I might get arrested of something, but Dan encouraged me to do it.

At rehearsal, I was surprised to find that Okada had the actors working at the table. He must have realized it would be practically impossible to get these actors (unfamiliar with his work and methods) to speak and move in the way he wanted them to, so he was just focusing on their speaking. The direction remained the same -- to deliver the text with a singular intention that embodies what drive the whole sentence/phrase, without changing that intention through the course of saying it, without being swept into the dynamics of the words. Which in essence is to tell actors NOT TO ACT. He would make them repeat sentences three times until the meaning of the words were no longer being "performed" so that the words had to carry meaning by themselves, without the lilting of the voice or the support of emotional fluidity. Or sometime he would make them break up a sentence into three breaths.

Dan thought the actors looked extremely unhappy. It's hard for me to read Japanese people, honestly, but I thought they had no idea what Okada was talking about. Later Dan asked Okada if he liked any of these actors (the actors were selected by the theater -- Okada had never met them before) and Okada, after umming for a few moments, said no, not really. lol.

We went out for Chinese food for our first dinner -- this was the final meeting Okada and Dan would have together, because Okada is not available on Thursday. We went through our textual questions and schema. I think I forgot to mention this, but pretty early on this week, Okada had told Dan that, because Dan is a creator himself (as opposed to just a director), he felt that Dan should feel free to diverge from the specifics of the play text -- in order to realize the script more fully. I think this statement from Okada, is not only generous and trusting, but also indicates that he truly has his eye on the art, and NOT that he is attached to this or that detail, this turning of the phrase, that particular transition. It's a great great thing to have this liberty and to be able to give this liberty -- in my opinion a gift that makes this project a collaboration.

I was enormously tired after translating this conversation, but Dan's friend Hinako had invited Dan and me, and Dan's younger brother Jason, a photographer who arranged to be in Japan for some interviews, to the only Argentinian restaurant in Tokyo, EL CAMINITO run by Hinako's "second father".
It was a lovely evening and awesome food (I am sorry it was just too dark in the restaurant to take photos) and I learned so many things about Dan that surprised me.

1. He hates Woody Allen and the Coen Brother. (Um, WHAT?!)
2. But at least the original Star Wars (esp SW & Empire) were formative influences
3. He went to Collegiate (a fact that somehow he really did not want me to blog about -- but which was interesting to me because I came to be friends with many people who went there)

Jason was another kind of element entirely, from Dan, and it was so funny to see them together. The dynamic of family...
The restaurant was in Azabu, near the Tokyo Tower. I honestly don't think I'd seen the Tower since I was like 4 years old. It was really beautiful at night. I felt much better after the day.