Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is followed by an inquisitorial barrage of absurd personal questions that might have been dreamed up in a collaboration between Kafka and lonesco. After this humiliation, Coco turns on his impassive tormentor in a tirade that is pitiful but disruptive, the only flaw -and a slight one-in an otherwise memorable production. Giving an enormously resourceful performance, James Coco is a kind of vulnerable pixy. He can bare every scar on his psyche and yet coyly tease a line the way a hairdresser teases a curl...
...seminar, which meets at 9 p.m. on Thursday in Bertram Hall, will focus on "black humor as a modern mode of response to experience," Keeney said. Students in the seminar will read works by such writers as William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett. They also may discuss some of Kafka's writings...
About the nature of the problem the two writers would have had, I think, little quarrel. But about the solution their views are crucially divergent. In Kafka there was simply none available, for the very qualities which render the dreaded state intolerable--its impressive size, structural inefficiency, and grotesque involution--also render it effectively invulnerable. Hasek, on the other hand, saw in these same qualities the faults which invite the wedge: nothing so ludicrous could really expect to survive. Hasek created the figure of Schweyk, the good soldier, whose will to survive encompasses his will to resist, and whose native...
These days, Kafka's version is very much with us, and justly so. But like the people say, consider the alternative. In the extremely informal comfort of an Eliot House main dining room spotted with wrestling mats, army blankets, cushions and chairs, the next weekends offer a free, funny, and frequently poignant update on Hasek, in the form of a rare English language production of Bertolt Brecht's Schweyk in the Second World War. An update it is, for in his telling epilogue to the production, translator Charles Sabel would have it emphasized that even for folk heroes times change...
...text might suggest would be possible. The amount of didactic mileage concealed in a series of simple comic vignettes pitting a group of small-time Czechs against a team of penny Nazis is something to experience for oneself. Though it may not finally upset one's faith in the Kafka version, this production will give that faith a thoroughly healthy shaking-up. That much, at least, I think we deserve...