EDFNOTE. Your VN-oddity for the day. VN character in play _Kafka on Ice_.
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Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 07:51:22 -0500
From: "Sandy P. Klein"
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[1]
http://www.westword.com/issues/2004-10-14/culture/theater2.html[2]
Cutting-Edge Comedy
DENVER WESTWORD Wed, 13 Oct 2004 5:53 PM PDT
The
parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on both sides of the
street.
Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is being turned
away at the
front desk: "I'm sorry. We're all sold out." _[3][4] [5]
Cutting-Edge Comedy
Buntport's Kafka on Ice _slices up the
melancholy author's life.
BY JULIET WITTMAN
feedback@westword.com
_
Erin Rollman and Gary Culig in Kafka on Ice_.
_
KAFKA ON ICE _
Presented by Buntport Theater through November 27,
alternating with
_Macblank_, 720-946-1388, www.buntport.com[6]
WHERE:
717 Lipan Street
The parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on
both sides of the
street. Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is
being turned
away at the front desk: "I'm sorry. We're all sold
out." When I first
visited this place a few years ago, there were
seven or eight people
in attendance, including myself and my friend. Now
word must be out
that this is the place to be on Saturday night: Buntport
Theater, the
opening of _KAFKA ON ICE_.
We find seats and
settle in to clip-cloppy, '30s-style music that
sounds like the
Charleston. We're going to be close enough to the
action to see the sweat
shine on the actors' faces. There are rows of
chairs on all four sides of
a green square of artificial ice -- not
gleaming ice-rink stuff, but
something that looks like ancient
linoleum, scratched and scuffed.
What on earth do these people at Buntport think they're doing? Franz
Kafka is a melancholy figure, a Prague-dwelling German Czech, steeped
in
the history of his time, the creator of a dwindling, despairing
art. Not
noisily or grandly despairing, but art that's a kind of
falling away, a
hopeless whispering, the toneless song of _Josephine
the Mouse Singer_,
the silent melting of flesh from bone in _The
Hunger Artist_, an art of
terror, self-loathing and wordless longing
for what can never be attained
-- and all of it limned in that
precise bureaucrat's prose. Kafka's
best-known works include a novel
about a man tried for an act he doesn't
even know has been committed
-- let alone by him -- and ultimately
executed. Another describes a
castle from which it's impossible to escape.
And then there's the
long short story called _The Metamorphosis_, which
almost every high
school student knows and which begins, "As Gregor
Samsa awoke one
morning from uneasy dreams h e found himself transformed
in his bed
into a gigantic insect."
But all of these
cheerful Saturday-night people haven't come here to
explore the sorrows of
old Europe. They've come for a good time. And
the Buntporters aren't
exactly known for their worshipful treatment
of the classics. But then,
they're not known for denigrating or
nullifying or being plain dumb about
literature, either. So what are
we going to see?
The bouncy
music stops. In the darkness that follows, we hear the
scritching of a pen
on paper, like the sounds of a skate blade on
ice. Under the sudden
illumination of a single, bare lightbulb, we
see Kafka, played by Gary
Culig, writing at a desk. Within minutes,
the rest of the cast has skated
on in impressive unison -- yes,
wearing real skates -- and the show takes
off.
_Kafka on Ice_ is part biography. It tells Kafka's story, about
his
fear of his overbearing father, his unhappy love life, his
friendship
with Max Brod, the way in which Gregor Samsa's predicament
represents
his own. But it also deals with the way a work like _The
Metamorphosis_ changes over time, as it passes through the minds of
friends, readers, critics, fellow writers, teachers and tricksters
like
the Buntport gang. So at one point you have the great novelist
Vladimir
Nabokov (played by Erik Edborg) arguing that, contrary to
some critical
opinion, the insect in _The Metamorphosis_ is clearly a
beetle, not a
cockroach. Then there's a teacher (a hilarious
performance by Erin
Rollman) trying to communicate the idea of
symbolism to her bored class
while peeping periodically at her own
cheat notes. The lights go out, and
a voice reads a passage aloud in
the darkness, bringing clarity and focus
to the words. When the
lights return, we watch a schoolboy cross t he
stage with his satchel
on his back, reading as he walks.
_The
Metamorphosis_ goes through several transmutations: It's played
as farce,
as an experiment with objects, as grinning, dancing musical
comedy.
Buntport has its own way of dealing with Kafka's life story. The
writer's meeting with his first love, Felice, is shown as a scene in
a
silent movie. She falls cutely about on the ice, while he,
Chaplin-like,
attempts to rescue her -- all to the accompaniment of a
plinking piano.
This show is anything but Kafkaesque. It's lighthearted, giddy and
goofy. As written, the climax of _The Metamorphosis_ begins with a
heartbreaking scene in which Gregor is drawn from his seclusion by
the
haunting sound of his sister playing the violin. In _Kafka on
Ice_ --
which has earlier referred to Kafka's thoughts on his own
Jewishness -- he
hears the violin solo from _Fiddler on the Roof_.
Buntport creates an
_Alice in Wonderland_ world where objects take
on their own life and shrink
and grow at will. The city of Prague is
represented by a pop-up in a book.
Gregor Samsa is at one point a
glove puppet, seconds later a
remote-controlled mechanical toy, and
finally, a costumed actor.
There are some really beautiful moments. Kafka sends Felice one of
his
stories to read; in her hands, it unfurls into the paper figure
of a man,
and she dances with it. "The writing does quite well with
her,"
observes Kafka. When Kafka proposes to another love, Milena,
his words are
made of light, flowing over the rows of audience
members, across the ersatz
ice and away up the walls. Her response is
a calligraphic
"Yes."
I have a couple of quibbles. Every now and then,
the script is
repetitive. Culig is a good actor, but he has an
endearing,
vulnerable quality that doesn't feel quite right for Kafka.
Brian
Colonna's Max Brod is pinch-faced, squeaky-voiced and very
amusing,
but too much of a caricature -- both as performed and as
conceived.
The real Max Brod was far more than a leech who took advantage
of
Kafka's fame; he was also the author's longtime friend and loyal
advocate. But all six actors do well. Erik Edborg has to stifle his
insanely anarchic instincts to play Kafka's heavy-handed father, and
it
works. Evan Weissman's turn as the charlady (in a uniform that's
pure
French maid) is a hoot, as is Hannah Duggan's determined yet
perplexed
expression every time she skates across the stage with a
flour sack in her
mouth (don't ask). As for Erin Rollman, I don't
have words to describe her
performance. She's a brilliant comic
universe unto herself.
All
of which explains the crowd in the lobby. It's safe to say that
no one else
-- anywhere -- is doing theater like this.
WESTWORD.COM[7] |
originally published: October 14, 2004
Links:
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[1] http://www.westword.com/
[2] http://www.westword.com/issues/2004-10-14/culture/theater2.html
[3] http://www.westword.com/
[4] http://www.westword.com/issues/current/culture_toc.html
[5] http://www.westword.com/issues/2004-10-21/index.html
[6] http://www.buntport.com/
[7] http://www.westword.com/index.html
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