Dead Elephants

Paris, 1870: a pair of French soldiers plot to kill and eat the elephants in the city zoo. St. Thomas, 1885: P.T. Barnum’s famous elephant Jumbo is struck by a train. Coney Island, 1903: an elephant is publicly electrocuted in what becomes the earliest recorded footage of the moment of death. In Dead Elephants, these three stories are braided around the contemporary struggle of a young couple grieving the loss of their infant child. With three performers playing twelve  characters across four timelines, Dead Elephants is a virtuosic, harrowing, and poignant meditation on death, mourning, and animals.

Content Warnings: Animal cruelty/abuse, graphic images, bright lights and themes of suicide and infant death.