For American drama fans, the ultimate contemporary theater experience would be to have seen a Tennessee Williams play directed by the author; for Europeans, it would be to have caught a Samuel Beckett drama staged by the playwright. For Japanese theatergoers, the equivalent would be to have seen a Shuji Terayama play produced by his theater company, Tenjosajiki. This is because, before his untimely death from cirrhosis at age 47 in 1983, Terayama single-handedly revolutionized Japanese contemporary drama. He brought to the stage a completely new dimension of ideas that qualifies him to take a place among the world's theatrical greats.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Terayama's death and the 30th anniversary of the Parco Theater in Shibuya, the theater is hosting a new staging by Tenjosajiki of Terayama's "Aohige Kou no Shiro (Duke Bluebeard's Castle)." And for fans who didn't experience the work of the master himself, this is about as close as they are likely to get, because this production's director and musical director, J.A. Caesar -- who founded the theater company Universal Gravitation in 1983 -- had until then worked with Terayama at Tenjosajiki both as a sound director and codirector. There's no danger of either imitation or slavish homage here, because Cesar has married his own understanding of this profound work to Terayama's distinctive, decadent tastes, adding modern sensibility and brilliant casting.

Terayama got his idea for the play, first performed in 1979, from the 1911 opera of the same name by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (1881-1945), which in turn was based on the fairy tale "Bluebeard" by French author Charles Perrault (1628-1703). In this tale, the tyrannical, six-times- married Bluebeard still has several spouses around when a seventh candidate appears on the scene.