Word: kafka
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...