How to Create Space for Belief: Scattering Loose Change Under the Sofa

──How to bring the audience's reality onto the stage
Theater is a conspiracy of believing in lies.
To make those lies work, actors, directors, playwrights, lighting designers, sound engineers, and staff gather in the theater.


Everyone is someone who creates an 'atmosphere for believing'.

However, no matter how much you polish a lie, that alone is not enough.
For the audience to believe, they need the 'reality' that exists within them.
What is necessary for that, to put it into words, isa 'space for belief'.

What is a 'space for belief'?

The stage is not reality.
But the moment an audience member thinks, 'I know this feeling,' reality emerges.
It is not the lines or the acting, but ashared sensation.
When someone somewhere in the audience feels, 'I understand that way of feeling stifled,' and when a sense of 'I've been there' or 'I've felt that' is born, the preparation for belief is complete.
A 'space for belief' could be called a space where the audience can
insert their own memories.

Not a realistic reproduction, but a realistic gap

What the audience wants is not a 'reproduction of reality'.
(Though that in itself is an amazing thing.)
Rather, it is a momentary slip—a silence, a slip of the tongue, a ragged breath.
In suchflaws, people find their own reality.
It is in those slightly broken moments that the power to believe is born.
The authenticity of theater resides not in perfection, but in the 'gaps'.


I like the saying that God resides in the details.
Every time, I scatter loose change under the refrigerator or sofa in the stage set.
That change never returns when we strike the set after the final performance.
I think of it as an offering to the gods for a good performance, so I never ask everyone, 'Does anyone know where the change that was here went?'

Playwriting and direction that trigger the audience's memories

Awakening the experiences that lie dormant within the audience.
For example, using the angle of the light to remind them of the scent of morning, or using a one-second pause in sound to recall the atmosphere of a breakup conversation.
No, no to copying reality; we create a device that
reboots the reality within the audience.It is best if a playwright can write lines in a scene that make the audience feel, 'If I had chosen a different path back then, would things have turned out like this?'

Creating reality together
Reality cannot be created on the stage alone.
But the moment the audience brings in their 'own reality,' the world is complete.
The audience is a co-creator of the stage.
A space for belief is a space where the audience canplace their own reality.
The actor believes, and the audience remembers.
In between, a one-time-only 'truth' called theater is born.

What makes a lie real is not the performer's technique, but the audience's memory.
That is why theater is the most honest place for lies in the world.

I think people have holes in their hearts somewhere, and perhaps they put the lie that is theater into those holes to move forward.
Today, too, someone will come to believe in that lie.
We may not be able to create a play that fits that hole perfectly, but believing that we can at least provide a momentary lid, we continue our work of telling lies today.
Please, do come to the theater to see a play.