Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes at the Lincoln Center Festival July 21, 2004

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.

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. McBurney is celebrated for his direction of such productions as The Lives of Lucie Cabrol, and The Street of Crocodiles (which were seen at previous Lincoln Center Festivals), among others. He 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.

LCF website