Interrogations: Words of Zen Masters

Photo: William Irwin

Interrogations: Words of Zen Masters is a solo show from Yoshi Oida. The title refers to Oida’s questions to the audience: What is the meaning of life? When a man has climbed to the top of a pole, how can he climb higher? Et al. He’s a Zen master questioning his students.

Some of the audience members throw out answers in answers to these koans. The master, of course, shoots down each one with a marvelously sarcastic wit.

A great deal of the performance is silence, during which Oida keeps the audience enrapt with his calm, commanding presence. I've seen few performers who could command his audience silently, as this master does. There’s silence as he waits for us to respond to his last opaque riddle and as he ruminates before his next. There are also passages of silence as he executes abstract movements. Pure movement usually leaves me cold, but Oida performs one set balancing a pole horizontally on his head.

This show manages to make the opaque profundity of Zen comic, while remaining respectful. When was the last time Buddhism made you laugh?

Accompanying the master sporadically is the music Dieter Trüstedt, an experimental German musician. The state is strewn with instruments, some of which he invented. The music is marvelous when it suggests the gentle sounds of nature, like traditional Japanese music. It’s less successful when it merely translates Oida’s movement into sound. It’s like writing the word “fish” next to a picture of a fish.

And Trüstedt’s presence on the stage is incongruous. The master is lean and bare-chested under a pale jacket; Trüstedt is wearing street clothes.

Oida introduced Interrogations at the Avignon festival in 1979. It was recently presented in New York by the Japan Society, which continues to bring us some of the most novel and rewarding theatre we have.