Japanese playwright and director Toshiki Okada's theater group chelfitsch specialize in a certain kind of discomfort. In Enjoy, which saw it's Portland premiere earlier this year at CoHo, that discomfort manifested in the way characters addressed the audience. His characters, members of Japan's "lost generation," frequently seemed to plead with the audience to understand them, or at least laugh with them. Realizing that the audience was laughing at them seemed to break their hearts.

In Ground and Floor, playing last night and tonight at Imago Theatre as part of TBA, the discomfort again arises from the way the characters interact with the audience. Unlike Enjoy, Ground and Floor is performed in Japanese. Subtitles are projected onto a screen on the stage, and the characters seem sometimes to know this is happening. One of the characters, a shut-in who has retreated into herself and in her loneliness speaks too fast for the subtitles to keep up, openly resents the need for subtitles, and that translates into a combination of resentment and pride about Japanese.

If that sounds complicated, keep in mind that that's one of five characters, only a few of which are alive. Okada seems to be interrogating the idea of life in Japan, actually weighing its virtues in an eerily morbid way. Some of these characters are ghosts, some only resemble ghosts.

Chelfitsch plays often include strange, deliberate choreography, requiring the characters to repeat odd motions endlessly. At first it's jarring, but it quickly becomes hypnotic. In Ground and Floor, characters dance these strange dances to an original score of alternately ethereal and percussive music from somewhere offstage.

It's a spare play, slow and often nearly silent. It centers around a woman, her husband, his brother, their mother, and another woman, Satomi, from the couple's past. Much of the actual content of the play is laid out plainly but briefly, offering strings to grasp at, but pulling on those strings seem only to wind up the odd mechanisms that send the actors reeling and dancing.

Loneliness, pain, duty - meaning in Ground and Floor is difficult to get at. It's a ghost story, but one gets the feeling that the whole population of Japan is either made up of ghosts, or about to be. The politics are subtle, and meaning is obscure and challenging. It's unlike any theater experience you'll have at TBA or elsewhere.

Ground and Floor is playing tonight at 8:30 at Imago Theatre. Get there early!