ARTicles vol. 3 i.3c:Welcome: Amerika

Welcome to the final production of the 2004-05 season, the premiere of Gideon Lester’s play Amerika or the Disappearance, inspired by Franz Kafka’s first novel. Since the founding of America, the vision of this country as projected by the rest of the world has always been a charged one – from nineteenth-century immigrants for whom America was the destination of dreams, to the current moment in history, when the world’s view of our nation is more complicated and, in many corners of the globe, more jaundiced. The image of America has also fueled the imagination of writers who have created dreamscapes of the empire across the sea. Bertolt Brecht’s stirring renditions of the hellholes of Chicago, Saint Joan of the Stockyardsand In the Jungle of Cities, were among the twentieth century’s most striking projections of America – an America that Brecht hadn’t seen and only imagined until his exile in Hollywood many years later. Kafka had likewise never come the United States when, in 1911, he began to combine elements from his own life in Prague, as well as the novels of Charles Dickens, the Yiddish Theatre, travel reports, and letters from his family in Chicago, to create the phantasmagoria of Amerika. The result is an engorged, frighteningly comic vision of the New World, and the astonishing first steps of one of the greatest artists of his century. A.R.T. audiences first met Dominique Serrand and Theatre de la Jeune Lune last season when they joined us to create The Miser. This gifted company divides its time between visionary productions of the classics and adaptations of literature and films, such as their beautiful versions of Robinson Crusoe, The Little Prince, and The Children of Paradise, which have been seen around the country. This season we invited Dominique and Jeune Lune to create an adaptation of Amerikawith us, bringing Kafka’s storytelling to life on the stage so that we could look at this reflection of ourselves anew. Thank you so much for your support this year. We look forward to a tremendous new season with you, beginning in September with Dominique’s glorious production of Bizet’s Carmen. Best wishes for the summer, Robert Woodruff Artistic Director