Kuro Taniro's 'The Room Nobody Knows'

Such a program appeared at FringeArts last weekend when they presented The Room Nobody Knows, an avant-garde theater piece by Japanese writer/director Kuro Taniro. Performed in Japanese with English supertitles, this bizarre work is every bit as unusual as one might expect — and much more besides. I entered into the experience expecting to have my mind blown and my horizons expanded, and this piece delivered on all counts.

The weirdness began with the stage, which was split into two sets, one stacked on top of the other. The upper set was an organic profusion of color, dominated by phallic-shaped furniture that made A Clockwork Orange seem demure by comparison. The lower set was a mix of tiles, fluorescent light, and walls covered with surgical equipment, as if at any moment an autopsy was going to be performed.

The action is described from the beginning as a dream. Everything that happens in the next hour is filled with the illogical logic and schizophrenic symbolism of a sex-drenched fever dream. There are toothsome elves polishing the phallic furniture, the dreamer himself helps his older brother celebrate his birthday by engaging in incestuous relations. There’s more, of course, but it doesn’t really have a point — which is pretty much the point. There were certain aspects that were clearly rooted in Japanese culture, such as the relationship between older and younger brother (outside of the sexual aspect, which is quite Freudian), but the story, such as it was, did not follow any real world logic.

I don’t think that anyone witnessing another person’s dream can adequately interpret that dream in any objective way — in fact, to try to pin it down with intellectual analysis only kills the dream’s unreal reality. You just have to accept it on a purely subjective level, and you either enjoy the ride, or you don’t.

I did.

I found myself carried away by the dream logic, thoroughly accepting the creative nonsensical world that Kuro Tanino had dreamt up. I didn’t try to analyze it overmuch, any more than I try to analyze the images in my own head when I dream vividly. A dream’s reality involves a strange logic where you know that you cannot accept anything at face value, but that you must.

And whether that makes sense or not, that describes precisely the mind-blowing experience of The Room Nobody Knows.