It is exciting to see a show based around historical themes; they are like familiar friends. Biographies are rich recourses. And, truth or fiction, they make up the bulk of one-person shows; Just In Time about Bobby Darin and Call Me Izzy about a fictional character.
So, you can easily assume that a play called Kafka would focus on biographical information, maybe dipping into his writings.
So, we are enticed to the project to learn about this subject; because Kafka doesn’t have the literary weight that some English writers (Henry James, Virginia Wolfe, Agatha Christie, George Elliot, Jane Austen) and American writers (Salinger, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner) have, all mandatory reading for students during their stretch in the US and English educational systems.
But still, there has always been the push to read edgy, underground, sometimes forbidden foreign language works, translated with varying degrees of success into English, like Hesse, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Simone de Beauvoir, Yukio Mishima... and Franz Kafka.
All of this as proof that this audience may know little about Kafka. “His works explore themes of alienation, anxiety, existentialism and absurdity of human existence within oppressive systems, such as Metamorphosis and The Trial.”
We are quickly aware that writer / performer Jack Klaff is well versed in Kafka. Research is the king of biographical and historical works. He also is very comfortable with this play that he has performed many times, nurtured first by Finborough Theatre, London and now supported by Twilight Theatre Co. and 59e59. Klaff presents a mountain of information touching on Kafka’s life, the people in his life and those later who comment on him and bits from some of his writings.
But this production is such a goulash of information, dodging back and forth between author and book characters and others, that is difficult to follow.
Director Colin Watkeys has not helped us any, although it is interesting to watch on this beautiful set. Klaff wanders around the stage, often out of the light. The many stacks of blank pages set on pedestals around the stage are picked up at random times and tossed into the air to scatter around the stage, often without clear purpose. There is a palpable disconnect between what happens on the stage and what Mr. Klaff is compelled to do.
If you are looking for the standard plot—what is the author trying to say about the human condition, who is the main character (protagonist), what happens to him during the course of the play and how does the action of the play change him—it’s not here.
After 90 minutes, it can be said that we know very little more about Kafka than in the beginning. There were too often times that we didn’t know who was talking and what their relationship was with Kafka. The little chunks of information just didn’t fit together.
The ideal audience for Kafka would have to know Kafka as well as Mr. Klaff in order to appreciate and follow. If you are extremely well versed in Kafka, his life and writings, this may be the play for you.