Staged Reading of The Elephant
By Minoru Betsuyaku, translated by Roger Pulvers
Directed by Sonoko Kawahara
This presentations is a part of New York Theater Workshop’s Suspect Abroad Project,
in association with Japan Playwrights Association.
February 11th, 2008 Monday 7:30pm
New York Theater Workshop, The 4th Street Theater
83 East 4th Street (between Bowery & 2nd Avenue)
Admission is free
About the play and playwright 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 that have been produced, 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 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” had its English-language premiere at the Mercury Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1975, directed by Tony Richardson.
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February 11th Monday 7:30pm New York Theater Workshop, The 4th Street Theater 83 East 4th Street (between Bowery & 2nd Avenue)
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, 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. Betsuyaku, a pioneer of the post-1960 Japanese Angura (Underground) and Shôgekijô (Little Theater) Movements, is one of Japan’s most important contemporary playwrights. His work shows influences of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. The Elephant is his milestone play, first directed by the now internationally known Tadashi Suzuki, premiered in Japan in 1962, The play effectively launched the new countercultural Little Theater Movement. This is the first English presentation of this play to the New York audience. It is made possible by the support of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund. |
