Your roommate keeps his mom's head under the floorboards. Lease problems escalate.
Yukichi Matsumoto's 2013 stage adaptation of Shuji Terayama's "Lemmings". Two cooks share a room, one of which talks with his mother's head: it lives beneath their tatami mats. On the other side of their room's wall, lives a wife who desperately cares for her feverish husband. As more and more walls are tore down movie studios, hospitals and prisons are revealed, destroying the physical boundaries between their boarding house and the city.
Direction
Matsumoto's theatrical staging makes walls literally dissolve before your eyes.
Production
Set design that transforms a room into an entire collapsing city.
Director
Yukichi Matsumoto
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Shuji Terayama's original 1979 avant-garde troupe was legendary for destroying theatrical conventions; this adaptation honors his spirit by literally destroying the set.
The tatami mat as burial site inverts Japanese domestic sacredness—Terayama always weaponized traditional spaces against themselves.
US
