Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Amerikan pie
Kafka comes to the ART
BY IRIS FANGER

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika is that the author never came here, yet in so many ways he struck a mother lode of truth about our culture. He made some bloopers, too, among them picturing the Statue of Liberty with a sword rather than a torch in her upraised hand (or was that an eerie premonition?) and setting one end of the Hudson River Bridge in New York and the other in Boston.

Gideon Lester, associate artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, has spent the past year adapting Kafka’s novel for the stage, using the original German-language publication. "The most extraordinary thing is Kafka sitting in Prague in 1911, a German-speaking Jew in a country becoming anti-Semitic, a decaying old world, and he’s fantasizing about a huge country filled with people and obsessed with liberty," he marvels. Lester’s adaptation, titled Amerika or The Disappearance, is getting its world premiere at the Loeb Drama Center next Saturday, a co-production of the ART and the Minneapolis-based Théâtre de la Jeune Lune.

Kafka’s book follows the journey of 16-year-old Karl Rossmann, who is sent by his European parents to America because he’s fathered a child by a servant girl who seduced him. The coming-of-age chronicle of Karl’s adventures draws on influences that Kafka absorbed from sources as disparate as Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and letters home from immigrants who had come to the United States just after the turn of the 20th century. That plethora of notions about America was enhanced by Kafka’s artistic vision of the contradictions of a colossus as pictured by Europeans accustomed to vastly different traditions and geography.

The experience that Karl undergoes is nothing new to the English-born Lester, who has lived in Cambridge for 10 years. He first visited America as a child of eight. "I responded to the theme of a young man arriving in America. I remember my feeling of amazement. Landing at JFK Airport was very frightening." In the same boat, so to speak, was the Théâtre de la Jeune Lune’s Dominique Serrand, who’s staging this production. (He also directed the ART’s The Miser last season.) He was born in France and immigrated to America 30 years ago, and he says, "The journey that Karl goes through is very familiar to me."

The creative duo made the decision not to set all the action in America. Lester explains, "One-third of the work is set in the United States, one-third in Europe because Karl mostly meets transplanted Europeans here, and one-third in Kafka’s imagination."

Mindful of the differences between the format of a novel and the needs of theater, Serrand, who has adapted many literary works for the stage, has constructed something that’s unlike a conventional drama. "It’s a pretty organic process. The first thing when you touch a novel is the way the story is being told, more than the story itself. Every novel has a plot, but the plot ends up secondary. I work with storyboards. I don’t pretend to start with a play. I’m doing a dramatic journey. I refer to the cinema because this novel was written when cinema was beginning, when it was becoming a new art form."

Both Lester and Serrand consider the subtitle The Disappearance to embody the work’s major theme. "It’s as if Karl had disappeared into the landscape," Lester says. "He loses his name, his voice, his money. He’s been absorbed by the new culture, the new corporation. There’s a fabulous ambiguity at the end."

"It’s so beautiful to read a novel about immigrants who come into a country of immigrants, of dreams," Serrand adds. "I never think of Kafka as being dark and intellectual. I think of the work as colorful and luminous."

Amerika or The Disappearance plays at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, June 18 through July 10. Tickets are $12 to $72; call (617) 547-8300, or visit www.amrep.org


Issue Date: June 10 - 16, 2005
Back to the Editor's Picks table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group