Silence.

Most people would not associate the quality of silence with the sea. And yet in Silence, Steven Dietz's stage adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel, the sea, with its brutal indifference to human life, begins to signal a kind of silence to a devastated young missionary. Caught in seventeenth-century Japan during the savage persecution of Christians, Father Rodrigues feels his faith wavering when no miracles answer human pain. When the faithful are suffering for God's sake, Rodrigues begins to wonder, why does God refuse to grant them, if not help, then at least a sign of his presence?

The Theater Company Subaru production of Silence, which traveled to several American cities in October, was an agonizing study of belief and the limits of human certainty. Though dramatically stiff and rhythmically choppy, the play, which was performed by Japanese and American actors (and co-directed by Joseph Hanreddy and Ganshi Murata) delivered confrontations so profound and immediate that aesthetics seemed to fade into the background.

The play's trajectory is launched from an apostasy, as the assured young Jesuit Rodrigues (Lee E. Ernst) hears that his former teacher has renounced Christianity while working as a missionary in Japan. The rumor, and the reports of the cruel oppression of Japanese Christians, only strengthen Rodrigues's eagerness for his own mission to the country. Arriving in the coastal region near Nagasaki, Rodrigues and his partner, Garrpe (Torrey Hanson), find that the authorities are rooting out surreptitious Christianity by forcing local villagers to trample upon plaques of Christ and the Virgin. Those who refuse are killed or imprisoned. (By such means military authorities more or less eliminated Japanese Christianity during the seventeenth-century's first sixty years.)

When they are captured, the two priests confront the same test, the price of their refusal being the torture and murder of the converts they have ministered to. As the Grand Inquisitor-like interpreter (Yukihiro Yoshida in the Subaru production) batters Rodrigues with relentless temptation and argument, the Jesuit's confidence crumbles. Perhaps his own zeal, his fervent endorsement of martyrdom, are forms of hardheartedness? Perhaps the campaign to spread Christianity across the world is nothing more than arrogant cultural imperialism? The play's harrowing conclusion shows Rodrigues and his colleague answering these questions in opposite ways.

In scenes that bounce thematically off the gospel story, and that frequently pose scenes of death against the backdrop of the sea, Silence wrestles with the notion of certainty. Why is there evil in the world, the jaunty interpreter demands during a debate with Rodrigues. "That is the age-old question," the priest observes. "And what is the age-old answer?" his tormentor rejoins, taunting the pious young man with the insufficiency of his philosophy.

By the end of the play, the path of uncertainty, rejection of religious absolutism, willingness to suspect oneself of hubris, humility in the face of other cultures and even of events begins to seem preferable to unswerving conviction, no matter how theologically orthodox. Like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, with which it shares many themes, Silence explores the idea that flawed human beings can still be ministers of grace. "Our Lord, too, entrusted himself to the most untrustworthy of men," one priest points out. As the story unfolds, doubt becomes another aspect of human frailty, perhaps the most important aspect.

The concept of uncertainty, which colors Dietz's script, also shaded the performances in the Subaru staging. Act 1's early scenes in Portugal and the Jesuits' Chinese outpost were stilted and stagy, and Ernst's delivery was flat. It was when Rodrigues first experienced doubt, standing alone in an abandoned village just before his capture, that the production really took off. "Why this silence? How can God witness the persecution of Christians and do nothing?" Crying these lines, Ernst's voice quavered, became full of emotion, changed in resonance from sentence to sentence. The play broke free from history to involve and, what is more to its credit, disturb a modern audience.

Even the scenic design seemed to allude to the instability of human knowledge. Designer Kent Dorsey created a look for the piece relying almost entirely on lights thrown on and through a translucent screen. Missionaries, persecutors, and the faithful played out the main drama on the nearly bare forestage, but the images that guided and haunted them - priests celebrating Mass back in Portugal, a Japanese magistrate on a thronelike seat, Japanese converts crucified on a beach - appeared through the scrim, so that they seemed to exist in a separate reality. This visual device hinted that belief follows in the wake of powerful images, and that as new images appear, belief can change.

At the same time, the production's shifting images did not seem entirely the province of mysticism. An effect like the pure light-and-color segue between a circular stained glass window and the Japanese Rising Sun, both projected on the scrim, reminded the audience that cultural exchange also involves changing images.

In an author's note included in the program, Dietz recalled that, on meeting the eminent Catholic author whose novel he wanted to adapt, he wondered, "Why would this man entrust his masterpiece to me?" The American play-wright concluded, "I think that Mr. Endo knew that by encountering Japan through the historical prism of his novel, I would be forced to become, in a sense, a missionary. I would be required, over time, to abandon my prejudices (both cultural and theatrical) in the service of something unknown to me."

While reminding us how painful it can be to reach away from certainty toward the unknown, Dietz's play suggests that the process can lead to revelation. In the words of the philosopher Francis Bacon, who had barely been dead a decade by 1637, when the action of Silence takes place: "If a man will begin with certain-' ties, he will end with doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."