Word: elephantitis
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So, of course, Simon McBurney had to try. His London-based Complicite theater group teamed up last year with Tokyo's Setagaya Public Theatre to tackle Murakami. ("Japan's Kafka," McBurney calls him.) The result, The Elephant Vanishes, has played to packed houses and rave reviews in Tokyo, New York...
Appropriately, The Elephant Vanishes is a difficult beast to describe. Based on three short stories from the author's 1993 English-language collection of that name, the production is set in Tokyo and performed in Japanese with English (or, in Paris, French) supertitles. It concerns a kitchen-equipment salesman obsessed...
That doesn't begin to describe it. Using projected images, video footage, crisp sound effects, dazzling lighting and an acrobatic cast that flits around on wires, McBurney melds the three stories into a meditation on anxiety and loss amid the placid routines of life in urban Japan. The kitchen salesman...
Reinforcing this sense of reality's elusiveness, projected images turn the bare stage convincingly into bars, bedrooms, kitchens, showrooms and highways. The actors sleep in vertical beds and, when one stands up, he is horizontal to the stage. Characters split into identical versions of themselves, some carrying on with life...
Here’s where film studies is exemplary. For if there has been an area where American economic (and stylistic) dominance has driven complicated cultural and institutional resistance, it has been in film. Resistance to Hollywood has been national and personal; it’s been aesthetically radical and...