ARTicles vol. 3 i.3c: A Dark, Adapted Eye

Kafka’s dark fantasy tugs on the imagination of theater artists. His characters knock on doors without addresses to keep appointments with unknowable hosts. Kafka’s world compels writers and directors to explore the blank spaces he built into his tales; his greatest works – The Castle, Amerika, In the Penal Colony, The Trial, and The Metamorphosis – have given birth to an astounding diversity of performance pieces. It’s as if Kafka had never gone away, and, hidden behind the stage curtain, still scribbles out tales for the postmodern imagination. Kafka’s anti-bureaucratic masterpiece The Castle was the first of his books to make its way to the stage. Not only did Kafka’s best friend Max Brod break his promise to burn all Kafka’s unpublished writings after his death, he also adapted his companion’s last novel to the most public of all art forms. Ingmar Bergman staged it at the Malmo City Theater in Sweden in 1953, and a Hebrew translation of Brod’s script was performed in Israel in 1976. In 2002 the Manhattan Theater Ensemble gave Brod’s adaptation its American premiere, and an epic, three and a half hour adaptation of The Castle by Japanese director Osamu Matsumoto currently performs at the New National Theatre in Tokyo. Known for the baroque visual elegance of his productions, director Matsumoto’s Castle inhabits a dark stage haunted by mysterious, black-robed figures weaving through the set, watching the action from behind pillars. Matsumoto also adapted and staged a Japanese version of Kafka’s Amerika in 2001. Matsumoto explained his approach: “…I was not aiming for a simple reduction of the novel … I believe that simply and realistically following a text is not the way forward for drama … I am more interested in creating a new effect based on the source.” Kafka’s Amerika has also inspired creative adaptations at the Teatron Theater of Jerusalem and Berlin’s Maxim-Gorky Theater. The Gorky’s production transports Kafka’s early twentieth century novel into the twenty-first century. Here the immigrant Karl, Kafka’s Chaplinesque hero, finds the digitized postmodern present just as disarming as the rapidly transforming modern world that terrified Kafka’s generation. In Israel, the Teatron Theater’s adaptation used the plot of Report to the Academy to solve the enigma of Kafka’s unfinished novel: Karl befriends a captured ape who’s adopted human clothing and speech. Michael Hoffman’s fresh translation of Kafka’s novel in 1996 did much to ignite this current firestorm of Amerika adaptations. In November 2000, Joanne Akalaitis and Philip Glass created a minimalist opera for the Court Theatre in Chicago based on In the Penal Colony. In this short novel, an ambassador visits a colonial African prison camp to witness an execution by the dreaded “Harrow,” a writing machine that engraves the broken law onto the prisoner’s flesh until he expires under its biting needles. Akalaitis and Glass worked for years on this project that featured robotic choreography. Peter Sellars staged another Kafka-inspired musical piece, Gyorgy Kurtang’s Kafka Fragments, at Carnegie Hall in January. Sellars brought together excerpts from Kafka’s diaries and letters and melancholy music for soprano and violin. The two performers, barefoot and in rags, made wonderfully expressive theater of Kafka’s words. While Kurtang’s composition was not written for the theater, “Kurtang …” according to Sellars, “… is a hugely theatrical composer … It’s a theater of … hidden meanings and hidden emotion, which surface unexpectedly and disappear without a trace.” Critics called Sellar’s musical Kafka “incandescent.” Canadian composer John Metcalf’s grand, multi-media opera Kafka’s Chimp, inspired by the short story of an ape becoming human (Report to the Academy), premiered at the Banff Center in 1996. The production featured enormous television screens projecting disorienting, MTV-like video images. Metcalf hoped the set would bring a younger audience to opera, one whose aesthetic might have just caught up with Kafka’s ahead-of-it’s-time social deconstructions. The Trial has a resonant history of stage presentations, most notably by Andre Gide, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Peter Weiss, as well as challenging cinematic adaptations by Harold Pinter and Orson Welles. In Welles’ 1962 version, Anthony Perkins was perfectly cast as Kafka’s bureaucratic victim “K” immediately following his success in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Recent stage adaptations include K: Impressions of The Trial, developed through actor improvisations at the Guthrie Theatre in 1995, and the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s disorienting 2002 production with actors swapping roles from scene to scene. Actor Steven Berkoff created the king of all Kafka stage adaptations with his hyperphysical Metamorphosis, first performed at The Round House in London, 1969. A fervent adaptor of Kafka, Berkoff has performed intensely choreographed interpretations of nearly all Kafka’s major works. Yet it is his Metamorphosis that has echoed through the world’s theaters, with major interpretations by actors as diverse as Tim Roth, Roman Polanski, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In Kafka’s best known tale of human alienation, Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to discover that he’s turning into a giant beetle. Berkoff’s classic adaptation trades a costume for an energetic physicalization of the man-turning-bug, and requires the performer to scamper up and across a metal gymnasium frame to achieve the effect of Samsa gazing down from the ceiling at his dismayed family. What would the reclusive Kafka make of these theatrical children he never knew? A page from Kafka’s journal sheds light on this question: “This tremendous universe that I have inside my head, how can I free myself and set it free without being torn to pieces?” Kafka asked, “Yet I would a thousand times rather do that than keep it confined or buried within myself. This is what I am here for, I have no doubt whatsoever of that.” Perhaps Kafka would thank his interpreters, for he knew that his art had a life of its own, a striving for external expression. In the hands of so many gifted dreamers, Kafka’s dreams have awakened in the theater. Mark Poklemba is a second–year Dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.