Kdang!

Know thyself, said the ancients. Man cannot know himself, say the moderns. He is the enigma of enigmas, a brute wrapped in reason, an innocent ensnared in sensuality, a master builder of societies and civilizations who wrecks them like a frustrated child. This is the underlying theme of British Playwright Edward Bond's Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is having its U.S. premiere run at Boston's Charles Playhouse.

The play is vaguely set in Japan in about the 17th, 18th or 19th century. Dramatic purists might reject the entire work as being similarly vague, as too often cloaking murk in mystification. The action unfolds like a series of semi-related Japanese prints, some limpidly serene, others viscerally gory.

There is no hero. The central figure is Basho, the great 17th century Japanese poet. To this role, Nicholas Kepros brings a wry gravity of mien and a musical clarity of line delivery that merits his being called Zen Gielgud. Basho is on a quest for enlightenment, a radiant shaft of wisdom that will have the direct luminous perception of one of his poems:

Silent old pool

Frog jumps

Kdang!

Instead, he encounters the world. A power-mad dictator, Shogo, establishes a great city but it is overthrown by Blimpish invaders blasting away with gunboats and Christian hymns. This regime establishes an inner tyranny of sin and guilt, and it too collapses. At play's end a nude man, all but drowned, clambers out of a river and towels himself off--the naked ape--a genius at survival and a dunce at self-transcendence.

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