ARTicles vol. 3 i.3c: Fresh Off the Boat

Central to Franz Kafka’s Amerika is the state of amazement, in the richest senses of the word: “filled with wonder,” but also “bewildered” and “lost as in a maze.” Indeed Karl Rossmann’s amazement and dislocation on first arriving in New York Harbor and on discovering the beauty and horror of a new world were what initially drew me to Kafka’s novel. I remembered how, when I was eight years old, my own father first brought me on vacation to America from my native Britain. I have retained four vivid memories of that trip: being met by a cab driver at Kennedy Airport who, having told us gullible Englishmen that all four lower Manhattan bridges were closed, took us on a mighty detour through Queens; on that same drive, passing the prison-like, faceless towers of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Ward’s Island, the scale and grim austerity of which I’d never seen at home; my surprise and delight at discovering quite how many American television stations carried children’s cartoons on Saturday morning (it seemed like hundreds); and above all, gorging on my first ever Hebrew National hot dog at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Trivial incidents, but each of them could have found their place in Kafka’s gluttonous, overwhelming, amazing account of a first visit to a new land, so precisely drawn and familiar does it seem. What distinguishes Karl’s experiences, and makes mine seem banal in comparison, is that Kafka had never been to the States when he wrote Amerika. Although he researched aspects of American life with care, the world that he constructed was essentially fictional – a composite of travel reports and photographs synthesized and amplified by Kafka’s extraordinary power of invention. When planning this stage version, Amerika or the Disappearance, I was determined to maintain that fictional quality. The play is emphatically set not in our own America but in the fantastical nation of Amerika (I retained the German spelling to make the distinction clear.) This Amerika includes the provinces of Kalifornia, Kolorado, and Oklahama, as Kafka himself wrote them. In this Amerika, the Statue of Liberty has a sword in her hand, San Francisco is on the east coast, and a mighty bridge across the Hudson unites the cities of New York and Boston. In other words the fantasy (some might say the errors) of Kafka’s novel – the dreams of his armchair tourism – has become reality in Amerika or the Disappearance. Early on in our discussions, Dominique Serrand and I resolved to include as few things in the production as possible that Kafka couldn’t have known about. Our theatrical presentation of Amerika exists, if you like, in a parallel universe, defined by the limits of Kafka’s experience and imagination. Nevertheless the two worlds of America and Amerika sometimes seem to have grown quite close; we began a developmental workshop for the production the day after George W. Bush claimed his second presidential victory, which added a new context to our reading of Kafka’s flights of fancy. The fantastical quality of Kafka’s writing extends to his detailed physical portrayals of characters, gestures, and locations. These descriptions sometimes transfer directly to the stage – the interrogation scenes in the Cashier’s office and at the Hotel Occidental, for example, can be reconstructed more or less exactly as Kafka portrayed them. But Kafka was also highly adept at creating unstable, contradictory environments. The Pollunder house is as physically impossible as an engraving by Escher, with staircases and corridors that seem in constant flux and rooms that appear to be simultaneously large and small. We see the house from Karl’s subjective point of view, and our vision is filtered through his “amazement.” Theatre is traditionally an objective medium; everything is on view to the audience all the time, which makes it difficult to frame a scene according to one character’s perspective. One of the great delights of rehearsing Amerika or the Disappearance has been the need to invent new forms of theatrical subjectivity, that allow us truly to discover the world through Karl’s eyes. This play, a year in the making, was written in circumstances that most playwrights would kill for. First, I was writing for a brilliant and creative ensemble of actors that I know well, and whose voices were in my ear as I wrote. Second, I walked each step of the journey with Dominique Serrand, one of the most inventive, collaborative, and experienced directors in the country. I owe him more than I can say. Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director.