The playwright Lynn Nottage wrote Mlima’s Tale after talking to the filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow. The Oscar-winning director, who had made an animated short about ivory poaching, told Nottage, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, that the subject was ripe for a stage production. Nottage got to work. Her play tells the story of Mlima, an elephant poached in a Kenyan savanna, whose ghost is trapped in the international ivory market. The elephant’s spirit haunts those who are responsible, at all levels, for his death. Mlima’s Tale premiered at the Public Theater in 2018. Miranda Cromwell directs. —Jensen Davis