Kaneko may get in your face - and later, you may be troubled to find a prostitute you hire doing even more - but I found myself just as fascinated by my own weird hands, which of course were not really mine, as I could tell by their manicure. Virtual reality is as yet a plaything in the theater, not really mature as an expressive device, and yet its use in “The Dark Master” emphasizes the isolation and interiority of the story and also of life during the pandemic. At the same time the smells of the sizzling garlic and steak are urging you closer.
Kaneko (who, like the other actors, dubbed his lines in English) doesn’t exist in real space in the show, yet he leans into you so closely that you may feel the urge, as I did, to push your chair away. Each audience member - there’s room for 10 pods of one or two people - in effect plays the customer dragooned into service without actually moving at all, you become implicated in the action: cooking, eating, sleeping. As rendered through the virtual-reality goggles, “The Dark Master” now stars you.
I say that Kaneko stars, but that’s not quite accurate. “The Dark Master” is as dour and antisocial as “Earnest” is giddy and garrulous, but both productions are intense experiences in part because the shifting terrain of coronavirus precautions has made them more themselves. That the two productions moved in opposite directions - one toward stricter precautions, one toward laxer - may be more than an accident of timing it seems to be an example of content calling out to form. The other, a revival of Oscar Wilde’s “ The Importance of Being Earnest,” was supposed to take place in a socially distanced, open-sided tent but wound up tightly packed into an indoor theater, with everyone breathing the same air, albeit through masks. One, “ The Dark Master,” a psychological drama from Japan, was supposed to be part of a live North American tour but emerged as something remarkably different, remote yet in person, with virtual-reality goggles.
Last week I saw two shows that exemplify the extremes of this mixy moment. As the return to live, in-person performance accelerates, many productions conceived under earlier limitations are emerging in a world that looks different than expected.
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