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The Way of Acting: The Theatre Writings of Tadashi Suzuki. By Tadashi Suzuki. Translated by J. Thomas Rimer. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1986. x, 158 pp. Illustrations, “A Play: Clytemnestra.” $9.95 (paper).

Suzuki Tadashi has been one of the most internationally visible proponents of Japanese avant-garde theater since the early 1970s. His productions of classical Western dramas such as The Trojan Women and Clytemnestra have been widely acclaimed for restoring vitality and relevance to plays formerly relegated to cautious and scholarly productions. Suzuki's techniques and theories of drama have been accessible to a limited group of students and scholars through workshops, programs at Juilliard and the University of Wisconsin, and his training seminars at Togamura in Toyama Prefecture. Those who have waited for Suzuki to make his ideas available to a wider audience may find The Way of Acting disappointing because it includes little concrete discussion of the methods he uses in his work. Instead, the book is a collection of five essays, a selection of undated diary entries, and a complete translation of Clytemnestra, reflecting the artistic and social concerns of one of the most unusual artists working in contemporary theater. The essays address subjects ranging from the struggle of a rural mayor to save the declining mountain village where SCOT (Suzuki Company of Toga) makes its home to the relevance of classical Japanese theatrical traditions to problems faced by contemporary theater troupes. All of Suzuki's disparate musings, reflections, and anecdotes are unified by his concern for the theater artist's struggle to establish artistic continuity and a true connection to a community. This concern is deeply tied to his sense that the contemporary theater artist—indeed, contemporary man—is essentially a being who "has no place to call his own and whose gods have departed" (p. 24). In the first essay, "The Grammar of The Feet," he examines the ways in which we have lost our connection to the earth, to our own spirituality, and to each other. He deplores modern architecture in which reversible, anonymous surfaces predominate and "spaces are profitably divided in squares, . . . all constructed from the same materials" (p. 21). Suzuki contrasts such spaces to the specificity and richness of traditional performing spaces constructed for No and Kabuki. He further suggests that the inviolability of such spaces is intimately connected to the deep sense of community and commonality endemic to traditional Japanese performing arts. No, in particular, has developed a fixed playing space and performing traditions that ensure its ability to pass along the collective experiences of its artists to successive generations of performers. It is this ability that keeps what might otherwise be a curious antique a surprisingly vital art form in Japan today.