Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...deeply sympathetic to the activists' position, I admire their tenacious protests, consciousness-raising and even fasting. Yet I would like to call them to a take perhaps a less confrontational political position and a more radical philosophical justification of their enterprise. As Kafka once said, "a book must be an ax which we can take against the frozen sea within us." Where the force of identity politics has failed heretofore, perhaps the vertiginous decentering occasioned by reflections on the metaphysics of identity can lead to the unforced consensus upon which all social movements depend...
...program for "The Trial" claims that Allan Piper's comedy playing this weekend at The Loeb Ex has nothing to do with the novel by Franz Kafka of the same name. An unfinished work published posthumously, Kafka's The Trial concerns a man's confrontation with a bureaucracy he cannot understand. He is tried for an unspecified crime by an enigmatic legal authority and all of his efforts to obtain justice result in frustration and a loss of human dignity. In the end, he is stabbed to death. Some critics call it an allegory of the quest for divine justice...
Allan Piper's production, on the other hand, is quite funny. In fact, it's a little crazy. The only similarity between the Piper and Kafka texts is that they are both stories of men fighting against loony justice systems...
Gladstone plays Zed with Woody Allen's-not Kafka's-angst, complaining and sarcastically barbing his detractors. Sometimes Zed's commentary is a little too clever to be seem spur of the moment as sarcastic barbs should, but the lines are funny nonetheless and Gladstone effectively conveys Zed's frustration at being in center of such a farce...
...Trial" isn't terribly deep. By invoking Kafka's name in the posters and programs, there is an expectation of higher meaning. The big joke is that there isn't really any meaning at all besides "Life sucks." There is no quest for divine justice. The show is sloppy and not terribly tight, but the actors have some great lines and are allowed to go nuts with their characters. Quick and funny, "The Trial" is a good time...