Em and I went to the Power Center tonight to see "The Elephant Vanishes," which was co-produced by Complicite, a London-based theatre group directed by Simon McBurney, and the Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo. The script was "inspired by the collection of short stories by Haruki Marakami," according to the program. Haruki Marakami, as it turns out, is wildly popular in Japan, and his work has been translated into several languages (including English). (Russ, I wondered if Kate had heard of these stories . . . )

It was the most amazing thing I'd seen since . . . well, since that production of Twelfth Night that the Globe did last year. (All right, so that was only a year ago, I realize. But this is Ann Arbor, after all . . . It's not San Francisco or Toronto or London, but for the midwest, it's pretty darned good. We do seem to get some knock-your-socks-off something about once a year, and . . . )

. . . I bought these tickets because I had a hunch that this performance might be It this Year. And I think I was right. (Another tip-off was that it was the only North American performance outside of New York. I figured that we would either like it or not, but that the production values would be good, in any case.)

I hardly know where to start to describe the performance; none of the descriptions I've read have done it justice. The paper called it a multimedia show incorporating dance, text, and sound, which made it sound like it might have been a postmodern mess. The paper didn't mention (although the program did) that the production was based on traditional Japanese Noh theatre, Kafka-esque stories, and multimedia elements combined with theatrical elements in a way that bent my mind, that's for sure. It was breathtakingly beatiful, provocative, and evocative all in one. (Emma found it terrifying, she said. Hasn't been so scared since The Truman show, she said. She compared the plots to Poe's; Poe, she said, "scared you with your mind." The girl is getting downright fun to talk to . . . )

I don't think I'd call them all terrifying, although the centerpiece of the show - which is the story of a woman in her mid-thirties who can't sleep because she finds her life stultifying, so she stays up reading Anna Karenina - certainly is. At first it's funny, but when she meets a very modern-day Anna Karenina fate, it becomes chilling.

The other two were just weird in a very Kafkaesque way. One concerned the robbery of a bakery (it was a touching portrayal of marriage, I thought), and the other a man who sees an elephant vanish.

I can't really do justice to the way those stories were portrayed theatrically; there certainly wasn't much of what you'd call "normal" acting at all. For instance, the bakery story is being told by a man to his wife - but there's also obviously the man as omniscient narrator, recalling the time he told this story to his wife. The man is played by a man, and the man-narrator is played by a man who's playing a puppet (his limbs are connected to obvious wires, which get pulled like a marionette's wires. And at several points, he's suspended over the stage as if weightless. He turns, pretends to swim, lies prone . . . )

The use of video in this performance was astonishing, partly because of the way it was displayed. The back of the stage was a video screen. There were two screens that looked like traditional Japanese room dividers that moved horizontally across the stage as if they were on tracks. They were used some of the time as screens demarcating inside from outside - inside the bedroom, say, vs. outside. (The screen at the front of the stage would then function as a door.) But they also functioned as projection screens. Sometimes these screens were moved from side to side, and the images they displayed went with them. And then there were television sets – these, too, were on horizontal tracks and also at varying heights. The effects they achieved were amazing. For instance, the elephant story is being told by a man in a bar, who’s talking to a woman. There were grainy, video quality images of Tokyo on the big screen in the background. Water and swimming were important motifs in the robbery story, and at several points videos of water (the same videos) were shown on the Japanese-style screens and the televisions. Oh, yes, and on the refrigerator. There’s a small refrigerator, about a third of the way to the right of center center stage, and halfway back, that played a major role in all the stories – and in connecting the stories – that was also used as a projection screen.

The action and sound were taken from Japanese Noh theatre, I’m surmising. Much of the play dealt with entrapment, and the difference between inside and outside - so doors opening and closing were punctuated by various loud, sometimes grating cymbal-like sounds. These sounds also indicated scene changes – for the duration of the sound, people would scurry around on stage in very choreographed, stylized movements and patterns – and move props. Sometimes during scene changes, the stage lights would dim and people would rearrange the televisions or Japanese screens (but never the refrigerator), and the same videos would be projected on all of them.

There was a video camera, too. At one point in the elephant story the man's hand is filmed and projected while he's drawing an elephant, shot from the angle you'd get if you were filming the projection of someone using an overhead projector. Later in the story (which ends with the elephant vanishing, remember), the video is played backwards so it looks as though the man were erasing the elephant.

And now, the kicker: The thing was subtitled. All the dialogue was in Japanese; there was a “super-titler” like they use at the opera around here . . . kind of the cultural equivalent of putting a blue light on a televised hockey puck so the viewers can see it, I guess . . . and just like the blue light at hockey games, super-titlers look really dumb most of the time. But in this performance the text was meant to be primary and the voices secondary - it helps to know that a non-Japanese speaker (Simon McBurney) adapted the translations of these stories while working with a Japanese theater company. So the super-titles were not really translations of what the people were saying – rather, the people were illustrating what the super-titled text was telling us. And since they're Kafkaesque stories, often what the text was telling us had little to do with plot; often the relationship between the text and what you saw on stage was not narrative at all. It was sometimes metaphorical or dissonant or ironic (or other things, I'm sure).

All in all, the whole thing was so layered and textured that five minutes into it I knew I’d have to see it dozens of times before I’d catch all the references and interrelationships of all those elements. (For instance, sometimes the patterns of people on the stage echoed things you were seeing on the video screens, but I never figured out why or when. And I didn’t catch all the water references . . . they seemed to occur throughout the piece, and I’m not sure why.)

Well, it’s getting late . . . I’ve told you everything I remember, which is a tenth of what was there . . . as I said to begin with, this performance bent my mind when it comes to thinking about multimedia and theatre. I’ll be chewing on this one for a long time to come . . .