Also this issue:

On the Job
Publicist and performer Christine Barbush is taking on Philly’s arts scene.
-Trish Boppert

Modern Marvel
Munakata Shiko's prints illuminate the PMA.
-Susan Hagen

Camelot/Broadway Love Affair
-Debra Auspitz

Time/Travel
-Morgen Rossmair

Mary Knott
-Paul Burress

August 15-21, 2002

theater

Kafka's Dick

by Toby Zinman

Kafka's DickThrough Aug. 25, Idle Contemplation Productions at The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-569-9700

Early one fine night, I fought against uneasy sleep. I was sitting in a chair. There were many people in the room. In the flicker of light, I saw human figures moving and mouths speaking. The doorkeeper said, “You have failed to make the right choice. You must stay within these walls for two hours.” I had done nothing wrong.

There are many Kafkaesque experiences available in this our 21st century, but perhaps the most ludicrous is being caught in a dreadful production of a sophomoric play about Kafka.

This is the kind of thing that gives summer theater a bad name. What would be community theater by any sensible standard becomes a focus of lively attention because there is so little else on. Alan Bennett, who used to be funny (Beyond the Fringe), and who can write interesting revisionist histories (The Madness of King George), wrote this pretend-clever play filled with undergraduate lit-crit jokes.

The premise is that an insurance salesman, obsessed with biographic trivia about literary giants, plans to write yet another article about Kafka. Somehow, inexplicably (natch), K himself finds himself restored to life in the contemporary world. He discovers that his trusted friend Max Brod had not burnt his manuscripts as he had promised but had published them and had written a biography, and that he, K, is now famous beyond measure. His name has "achieved adjectival status in Japanese."

What might be mildly amusing becomes leaden as these unskilled actors overdo at every opportunity. Although the cast is largely to blame, it is in the true spirit of Kafka to universalize the blame: Jay Wahl directs.