K. (review)

Because it appeared to anticipate important events, Franz Kafka's The Trial (and subsequent adaptations) is often discussed as political commentary. In the 1920s, when he wrote the novel, the Nazis had not yet annexed Kafka's home country of Czechoslovakia nor had they forced Kafka's sisters and millions of others into the ghetto and concentration camps. In 1962, when Orson Welles completed his film version of The Trial, President Kennedy and Dr. King were still alive and Watergate was a decade away. In 1996, when Greg Allen first directed K., his stage adaptation of the Kafka novel, the events of 11 September 2001 were unimaginable, warrant-less wiretapping of US citizens by their government was illegal, and Abu Ghraib was largely unknown outside of Iraq. Although Kafka's text remained terrifyingly prescient during the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, it was, at least for US audiences, fictional.

However, this 2010 restaging of K. appeared before audiences whose contexts were vastly different. The world that Kafka created was no longer an invisible, secretive infrastructure for US audiences. Current events seemed to come straight from the plot of The Trial: for example, the imprisonment of US citizen José Padilla as an enemy combatant, and the debate on the potential benefits of torture. The initial pairing of the experimental, iconoclastic Neo-Futurist Allen with the textually reverent Hypocrites, echoed the imprecise line between real events and Kafka's fiction. What made K. unique in its new political context was that Joseph K. became a much more complex character, as guilty as he was innocent and a singular embodiment of both our fears and darkest desires. The central conflict in this production was not, as might be expected, between K. and his accusers, jailors, and executioners; rather, it was within the character of K. himself.

Unlike Allen's 1996 production produced by Chicago's Neo-Futurists (creators of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind), this K. was produced and performed by The Hypocrites, best known for restaging character-centered modern dramas by Wilder, Miller, Brecht, and others. Allen's postmodern aesthetic, on the other hand, has been predominately influenced by his theories of Neo-Futurism, which dictate that performers only perform as themselves, that performances happen in the physical theatre and not in an implied/imagined setting, and that both performers and audience acknowledge each other's presence. So, unlike Paul Tamney who originated the role of K. as a purely Neo-Futurist performer-protagonist, this K., played by Hypocrite actor Brennan Buhl, was tasked with a contradiction: to create a distinct fictional character under the guidance of a writer-director for whom the words "fictional" and "character" were, at the very least, unstable.

The play's first few moments effectively illustrated this contradiction and simultaneously provided a reason for K.'s arrest. The first scene repeatedly detailed K.'s morning routine: matches struck and blown out in blackout, alarm clock, lights, ritual stretching, Mrs. Grubach's (Tien Doman) entrance with K.'s breakfast, small talk, and another blackout whenever K. repeated the line "Always eggs." Other than K., the characters continued to faithfully reproduce their actions, but with each recurrence, K. became more aware of the repetition, the audience, and his fellow characters' obliviousness to both. When K. deviated from the routine by getting out of bed he was immediately arrested. So, unlike Kafka's original character, whose arrest occurred without reason, Allen's K. was apparently apprehended because he choose to acknowledge his status as a performer. Additionally, although Allen and Buhl could not escape K.'s script, instead of rendering K.'s rebellion as tongue-in-cheek metatheatrics, his jailors stripped him in front of the audience as part of his arrest, revealing a physical body that was obviously only Buhl's. The remainder of the play served as a literal and metaphorical dressing of Buhl's body in the costume and actions of K.

Brennan Buhl (Joseph K.) and company in K. (Photo: Paul Metreyeon...