The production project "A Friend Has Come" by Sai no Tsuno, Yadokari House, and hanpo has begun.
The setting is Ueda City, Nagano Prefecture. At a cultural facility called "Sai no Tsuno," a movement to create a play has begun.
"A Friend Has Come." This quiet play has started moving forward with Daigaku Futakuchi, an actor from the original production, now taking on the role of director.
Sai no Tsuno, a cultural facility. Yadokari House, a guesthouse. hanpo, a free paper and web media outlet. Friends with various thoughts have put their heads together to set this play in motion. Thinking back, for the original production, two young actors, Futakuchi-kun and Okumura-kun, were rehearsing quietly, without any special support from those around them. I, too, wrote the script while feeling stifled in my own hot and cramped apartment, without any particular support from anyone. I remember peeking into the rehearsal space just once, feeling nervous about how these quiet lines would turn into a quiet play in that rehearsal space where they probably didn't even engage in much small talk...
How many years have passed since then? Many different actors have taken on the challenge of this two-person play. Many different directors have taken on the challenge of a rehearsal space that tends to become quiet. When I first created this work, I wrote it feeling like, "This is how people speak in my plays," but as I wrote scripts for various places and people afterward, I gradually acquired social skills. The characters became more and more talkative. They became characters who spoke more verbosely, explaining more things to others.
However, there is a sense that people are pointing out that the speech of these two boys, who don't speak very well, is actually me. As of now, this is the most frequently performed work among all my pieces.
Thinking about it, even though I intended for them to become very talkative, perhaps it means that "in the end, nothing is conveyed through words." Perhaps the characters are simply those who do not speak of anything meaningful.
My latest work is a two-person play for a man and a woman called "One Secret.", and I played the man myself. A talkative two-person play is difficult, and I memorized a massive amount of lines. In my own way, I rattled off various things with full-speed action. However, one audience member left a memorable comment in the survey: "The inaccessibility of words, the powerlessness of language, was strongly conveyed."
There was even someone who said to me at the reception desk after the performance, "In short, you wanted to say that all lines are meaningless, right, Mr. Suzue?" Theater that misses the mark. I see. Perhaps that was it. The more you talk, the more the meaning of spoken words fades. No matter how hard you try to say, "That's not it," all that gets across is the heat of your desire to convey something, and the fact that humans are beings who convey nothing—it's sad, but that is what is conveyed even more strongly. Those who feel it, feel it.
Then, what do people use to convey what to others? Is it even possible to convey anything?
I often do rehearsals where I say, "For now, let's just memorize the lines and stand there." Talking about the work doesn't convey anything. It's as if theater colleagues feel that by touching the work of theater concretely, they can convey things through the work itself rather than through chatter. But who knows. No matter how much we rehearse, it doesn't reach. Perhaps experiencing that frustration of not reaching, that very time, is what it means to experience a person, and that is, in other words, what it means to experience a play.
Then, why not talk to our hearts' content while we're at it? Does the photo of us sitting in a circle in this rehearsal space and talking show an attitude of returning to the basics and engaging with it? No, that might be different. But Futakuchi-kun, the quiet actor from the original production, has likely gone around this play once or twice already. In the end, I'm sure he will do plenty of trial and error from some angle. That is the only expectation I have in abundance.
This project will continue to be promoted via the website as needed. I will introduce it again if there is any further news.
https://sainotsuno.org/event/tomodachigakita2026/