Kafka Staged

SHOULD KAFKA remain between covers? The Cambridge Ensemble, a resident theatrical company, thinks not. Compiled by Peter Sander, guest director from Brandeis University, Kafka: The World of Parable has some genuinely inspired ideas about staging and the unstagable. But the ideas come off less well than they ought to. For the most part the actors get in the way, illustrating too well what is said about K: "Merely by being alive he is blocking his own way."

The problem with staging Kafka is that Kafka's realism is a tactile, not a visual one. K. is a faceless man in a Janus-faced world where you stub your toe on invisible rocks and hang your head against undetectable walls. It is a universe of paradox, people by bureaucrats, Chinese emperors and courts of law: all of which may or may not be mythical depending on whether you subscribe to them or not. To translate this state of affairs into performable drama is a challenge that Sanders and in some spots the Ensemble have barely missed meeting.

The set is bare and the actors use practically no props. The costume is white-collar Prufrock. With the exception of K. and the fatherfigure, all the other roles are interchangeable. The actors narrate in turn, take on the several voices of conscience and temptation, counsel marriage, art, faith or rebellion. The scenes interrupt and comment on each other. Adaptations from the short stories and novels are intercepted by reflections from the diaries and the famous Letter to his Father. Every moment repeats and plays on the basic pattern of a mind plotting its own victimization.

The net effect is one of comic frustration and absolute insecurity in a universe that conspires with one's worst self to make the sane, simple life impossible. This is best illustrated in a scene where K. sits at a table and trys to read. The actors crouching behind him each poke an arm through the crook of K.'s elbow: the hands begin to attack each other while K. looks helplessly on, believing his own body to be rebelling against itself.

Scenes taken from "The Refusal," "The Father," "A Report to the Academy," and "Before the Law" are handled well by director and actors. Thanks to the artistry of Henry Timm, who seems made for the portly malevolence of Kafka's worst bureaucrats, these skits are well done. Playing the father, the magistrates, and the ape who discovers humanity in a bottle of Schnapps, Timm has a masterful sense of just where it is that absurdity and humor intersect.

THE PERFORMANCE collapses during an adaptation of Amerika and throughout any of the other scenes in which Julie Ince, playing the thoroughly unnecessary part of the Woman, dominates. Ince is the sort of actress who points her toes a lot; what part the sensuous mannequin has in the world of Kafka is hard to see.

David Klein plays a fair K. with an appropriate air of nervous persecution. Tom Panas, playing the Second Man is a passable accomplice to Timm's First Man. But Timm is really the only one to do justice to the remarkably ambitious project of staging Kafka at all. The others are generally too weak to support the enormous burden that Kafka must place on the actor.

Still, Kafka: The World of Parable deserves all the audience it can get. The performance is uneven, it tends to make Kafka a little too slap-stick, but Sanders and Timm pull it off on a shoestring. Because Sander's principle of organization suggests more stream of consciousness than structure, it opens up Kafka's dramatic possibilities. There are many ways in which the play could have been built. As it is, this production hints at all of them. But Sander's and the Ensemble's greatest accomplishment is that theirs is not just a reading but what it purports to be--a dramatization of Kafka. With all its problems, Franz would have approved it.