The Elephant Vanishes

For their third visit to the Lincoln Center Festival, director Simon McBurney and Complicite, (formerly Theatre de Complicite) in collaboration with Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theater, bring the North American premiere of the multimedia theater piece The Elephant Vanishes, a dramatic retelling of three stories by Japan’s celebrated post-modernist author, Haruki Murakami. The Setagaya Public Theater makes its North American debut with these performances. The play will be performed in Japanese (with English supertitles).

A non-stop collage of images real and bizarre, The Elephant Vanishes interweaves the stories of a sleepless housewife who becomes transfixed by Anna Karenina, a kitchen-appliance salesman who is obsessed with an elephant that mysteriously disappears from the zoo in a Tokyo suburb, and a newly married couple, provoked by their midnight hunger to rob a McDonalds. Director Simon McBurney ingeniously transforms Murakami’s haunting tales of urban alienation into a non-stop visual journey of images real and surreal, incorporating TV monitors, and large and small video screens that slide across the stage, and Christopher Shutt’s fantastical sound score that combines music, electronics, and city noise.