NEW YORK -- How do you transport a quintessential Japanese play to the United States and still make it feel genuine?

Shinjuku Ryozanpaku theater company, which presented Juro's Kara ("Dr. Akagi," 1998) bizarre, twisted and highly relevant avant-garde masterpiece "Shojo Toshi kara no Yobigoe (A Cry from the City of Virgins)" here at the Japan Society last week, has the answer.

"We're gypsies; we're used to moving around," Sho Hara, who plays the lead character Taguchi, said at the cast party following the opening-night performance.

The troupe, which does not have a permanent home, is known for its portable purple tent, underneath which it often performs its bombastic, shocking, crude and always contemporary repertoire.

But even without its purple tent (or red one, for that matter, which Kara's Jokyo Gekijo [Situation Theater] was famous for erecting in unusual locations beginning in 1967), the troupe created an itinerant, street-theater feel at the Japan Society by beginning its performance outdoors, on the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, an hour before the officially stated curtain time. (Ticket holders were encouraged to show up early.)

Draped in traditional Japanese clothing (yukata, zori) and a mishmash of other more contemporary accessories (colored bandannas, straw hats, dark sunglasses, hot pink pants) cast members in white face paint paraded across the plaza as if en route to a village ceremony.

A second wave of performers crossed the plaza seconds later, this time, pushing a blindfolded woman in a red wheelbarrow. Once the entire group had assembled at the plaza's west end, the actors broke into song and dance, playing an unusual assortment of instruments, some hearkening back to traditional Japanese theater (kabuki clappers), some from Europe (the accordion) and others from straight out of the kitchen pantry (spoons, pots and pans).

Finally, amid the craziness, a young man, who we later learn is Taguchi, dressed in a comparatively conservative trench coat, announced that he was "looking for his younger sister."

In offering this sparse dialogue, the actors begin to preview the play, reminding us that, yes, we're actually there to see a play with a plot. (At a discussion earlier in the week, Kara said that he had dissected his play into 38 subplots.) The main story, we learn, revolves around Taguchi's mission to find and ultimately rescue Yukiko (Yuka Kondo), his younger sister, whose womb has been turned to glass by her fiance, Dr. Franke, played by the troupe's director Kim Su Jin, for whom Kara originally wrote the part when the play was first performed in 1985.

Sound absurd? It is, from the first moment of the play when yards of bushy hair are pulled from Taguchi's abdomen during an excessively bloody operation. Moments later, he verbalizes his dream that the hair must be his sister's and embarks on a search for Yukiko.

Once the siblings reunite, Yukiko does not place much importance on her brother's visit, but then when he is about to leave, she shoves his hand inside her to prove that her uterus is glass-cold, hard and truly dysfunctional. She says she doesn't care that she will never be able to have biological children. To the contrary, she is proud that her fiance -- who sports a white leather straitjacket to go with his robotic arm -- is the glass-factory chief.

But the audience sees that Dr. Franke is actually controlled by the explicit body gestures of a Darth Vader-like cloaked woman (Taeko Okawa), who never actually speaks. Also part of the glass factory scene are five bumbling "worker bees" dressed in red tights and bright yellow puffy tops with wings. When they are not getting their behinds swatted by Dr. Franke, they manufacture glass marbles, the blue kind found in the Japanese ramune-drink womblike bottles, that are so key to Dr. Franke's universe.

Later, the bees are invaded by a squad of fetuslike creatures, dressed in pink Michelin Man suits with fundoshi diapers. The fetuses appear almost cute until they start diving for the leftover pieces of slug-invested shark that Dr. Franke throws them.

Although firmly situated in the Japanese avant garde, Kim freely incorporates elements of traditional theater, from the acrobatic movements of kabuki to the conventions of a kyogen comic play.

Along the way, Dr. Franke has a dream in which the Japanese army, camped out in Manchuria, sends him home before they reach the Tower of Otena, for which Franke has been searching his entire life. "Find your own Otena," the captain (Shinobu Nakajima) bellows, alluding to the fact that Franke has realized his dream in the building of his glass "Otena" factory.

While the dream sequence is bizarre, so are the "realistic" scenes that take place at the hospital at the end of the play. While Taguchi suffers on the operating table, his friend Arisawa (Takashi Onuki) and his fiancee Binko (Katsura Hiroshima), slip into mundane conversation about relationships, and buy milk and bread from the cafeteria. Moreover, even the supposedly "real" doctors walk around with lamps and CD-ROMs clipped to their hats. In Kara's eyes, our everyday world appears to be just as absurd as Taguchi's dream.

Indeed, the tidal wave of marbles that comes at the end of the play represents not only the shattering of a glass womb, but also may be seen as a wakeup call to recognize the surreal elements of the world we take for granted.