The Elephant (2008)
By Minoru Betsuyaku, translated by Roger Pulvers
Directed by Sonoko Kawahara
Suspect New York Theatre Workshop Abroad Project in association with Japan Playwright Association
New York Theatre Workshop’s 4th street Theater
Man: I am a fish dangling by my tears ….
Man: Don’t you just want to lay down and die without causing any trouble to anybody?
Patient: Not me. I wanna be killed before I die.
Set in Hiroshima, “that town,” it tells of the indomitable spirit of a radiation victim, who does not want people to forget what happened to him there…in a world where everyone else wishes to relegate it all to the past.
ON THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAY by Roger Pulvers
Minoru Betsuyaku was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1937. After the war he lived mainly in Nagano, where he went to high school. While a student at Waseda University in Tokyo he was, with director Tadashi Suzuki, a leading light at the student group “Free Stage.” In 1966, he and Suzuki formed the Waseda Little Theater, which featured his plays.
Betsuyaku has written over 120 plays, in addition to essays, children’s stories, criticism and the screenplay for the animated feature film of the Japanese classic Night on the Milky Way Train by the early 20th-century poet and children’s story writer Kenji Miyazawa, whose works inspired Betsuyaku.
Betsuyaku’s plays have been performed by many theater troupes, mostly notably the Bungakuza, En and the Hyogo Prefecture Piccolo Theater with which he has been associated in recent years.
His plays often have an eerie, poetic quality, with characters who miscommunicate with each other in a manner suited to a non-committal fashion of Japanese conversation. Put together Beckett, Pinter and Kafka and place him in Japan, and you get a writer with a style seen in the brilliant, menacing and compelling plays of Minoru Betsuyaku.
The Elephant, written in 1962, was his first—and has been his most sustained—hit. Set in Hiroshima, “that town,” it tells of the indomitable spirit of a hibakusha, or radiation victim, who does not want people to forget what happened to him there…in a world where everyone else wishes to relegate it all to the past.
The Elephant is made possible by the support of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund.
Production Credits
Written by Minoru Betsuyaku
Translated by Roger Pulvers
Directed by Sonoko Kawahara
with
J.Ed Araiza、Gabriel Kalomas、Anna Foss Wilson、Daniel Neer、Akiko Aizawa、Carl Louis、Brian Nishii、LeeAnne Hutchison
Lights: Ayumu: “Poe” Saegusa
Special adviser: John Gillespie
The Elephant is made possible by the support of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund.