SINGAPORE — Japanese theatre group Gotanndadan’s offering for the festival revolves around the fairly predictable scenario of a 30-year-old woman going through a midlife crisis. Except that its unfolding is anything but predictable.

Playwright/director Shiro Maeda’s hilarious and surreal play is one continuous process of existential navel-gazing by its central character, Michiru Suzuki, as she navigates the streets of Tokyo under the shadow of its iconic landmark, the Tokyo Tower (inventively presented as a lighted piece of rope among rows of chairs).

There’s nothing subtle about its symbolisms. There is constant talk of a “cavity”, a “hole”, an emptiness that needs to be plugged, filled or sealed. And Suzuki, it must be said, can be as relatable as she is irksome, depending, perhaps, on one’s predisposition towards such confessional material.

But one isn’t looking at it from the outside. Here is mental process come to life, metaphor given shape in the most absurd and fantastical of ways. Loneliness and alienation in the metropolis rear up as Suzuki’s ghosts of past, present and future overlap — be it a sister who may or may not exist, a child not yet born, a mother, a father, a couple of lovers.

Maeda’s delightful script, full of silly talk, quirky minutiae and a playground for awkward silences, makes it palatable when the play swerves into pseudo-lecture territory. (One of its more salient points — about time’s relativity and non-linearity, and how everything shapes your own singular “face” — echoes the idea behind the movie, Cloud Atlas.)

But it’s the imagery in this free-for-all world that worms its way into memory, including one where Dad emerges from the stomach of “gigantic” Mom. I’ve been wondering about the play’s awkwardly phrased title. It may be a case of something lost in translation, perhaps, but maybe it also hints at a sense of purposefulness and willingness to step into a state of the undefinable. Going On The Way To Get Lost has no exits, solutions or final destination; but what an enjoyable, weird jaunt it was. (4 of 5)