Director Shigeyuki Toshima stormed into Tokyo last year with Molecular Theatre and threw down the gauntlet to conventional, visual-dependent theater.

We hear a lot about directors choosing images over words; Toshima applies the same process but in reverse--manipulating words beyond any possibility of conjuring an image to fit them. Hence, his 12-member Tohoku-based company scorns the wiles of conventional dialogue, delivering relentless, precisely choreographed bursts of text from sources as diverse as Franz Kafka's love letters and Samuel Beckett's notes. The result is dislocating and wrenching. In the trilogy Footnoted/Funneled/Facade Firm, Molecular gave us inventive theater stripped bare, turned inside-out and delivered in a merciless meltdown of syllables from seemingly all languages.

For us, the scene to beat all others was short and intense; staged in the round on a platform surrounded by venetian blinds. As the closed blinds were lowered almost all the way to the floor, the stiletto-heeled performers took over the staccato text rhythms with their feet. Very Peeping Tom, very seductive. Toshima, an irreverent pun lover, even had the scrap-paper footnotes of the title scattered across stage to be impaled on the writhing heels.

Besides writing, directing and producing all Molecular Theatre endeavors, Toshima is head psychiatrist at Seinan Hospital, writer and lecturer, proud proponent of Tokyo's Absolutist Club, and Japan's ambassador to Czech theater during the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

What started out as a form of art therapy for his patients has gone on to head the Prague Theater Festival (with Vaclav Havel overseeing), play Edinburgh, Istanbul, Warsaw and other festivals, and lead the triennial Tohoku Theater Festival. This March, Molecular plays Adelaide and Melbourne.

Toshima is meticulous, opinionated and completely in control. After spending almost a decade honing his company's sterility of delivery, absolute oppression of emotion and relentless shifts of perception, Toshima has achieved near-total perfection in his art form. He is Japanese theater's man of letters--all minutely analyzed, cross referenced and thrown at you in performance like a ballistic missile. "I don't want to dramatize text, or letters," he says. "I want to `letterize' theater."