From top: Franz Kafka; Charles Dickens; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton.

DISAPPEARING ACT

Ryan McKittrick speaks with director Dominique Serrand and A.R.T. Associate Artistic Director Gideon Lester about Amerika.

Last season's production of The Miser marked the first collaboration between the A.R.T. and Theatre de la Jeune Lune, an internationally renowned physical theatre company based in Minneapolis. The partnership between the two theatres is continuing as director Dominique Serrand returns to stage Amerika, a new play by Gideon Lester, inspired by Franz Kafka's first novel. Once again the production will combine members of the A.R.T. and Jeune Lune acting companies.

RM: Can you explain the play's title? Why the German spelling - Amerika - with a "k"?

GL: The production isn't quite set in America. Kafka never came to this country. Everything he knew about the States he had read, seen on film, or imagined. It's not a direct portrait, it's a fantasy. We're also interested in the connotations of "Amerika,"which was adopted during the Civil Rights movement by various groups including the Black Panthers to suggest a fascist state of America.

DS: The other title of Kafka's novel is The Man Who Disappeared. This is intriguing to me as a director, because I've never seen that on stage. It's hard to make a man disappear.

RM: How does Karl, the central character, disappear?

DS: The world absorbs him entirely. By the end he no longer recognizes himself; he can't differentiate himself from the walls he lives in. His individual identity gets lost in a message that is dangerous and overwhelming.

GL: Karl literally loses his identity. He loses his money, his clothes, his status as a bourgeois European. He even loses his name and adopts a pseudonym. In the final paragraph of Kafka's novel he literally vanishes from sight, as if the camera is panning out on a great landscape. There's a literary tradition of the Bildungsroman, novels that chart the evolution of the heroe's character. Amerika is an anti-Bildungsroman - it follows the disintegration of Karl's identity. The further he travels, the less he's there. The final episode, in which Karl attends a recruiting session for the Nature Theatre of Oklahama, is perfectly ambiguous. You can read it as an image of hell or heaven, death or Disney, the birth of a Utopian state, or a premonition of the Nazi Judentransport. However you interpret it, individual identity is being replaced by something much larger - we could call it the melting pot.

RM: Amerika is generally considered an unfinished novel. Have you needed to create your own ending?

GL: We have to regard the artifact that Kafka left us as finished in its own terms. The novel does become fragmentary, but those fragments are interesting, challenging, poetic, and mysterious - and those are all qualities we're keen to preserve. I think Kafka wrote himself to a place where there was nowhere else to write. By the end of the novel Karl has disappeared; the journey of the central character is complete.

RM: But there's still a sense that his journey through the States will continue.

GL: Kafka ended his novel with an image of relentless journey: "Karl understood for the first time how huge Amerika was," he writes. And then Kafka pulls the reader's attention away from Karl to look at the journey of the train and then the mountains the train is heading into, so that Karl is literally out of the frame. That seems like an ending to me. One of the many motifs that recur in Kafka's work is the journey that can never end. He wrote a parable about a messenger who is trying to deliver a message from an emperor, but before he can deliver the message he first has to leave the castle, and before he can do that he has to get down the stairs, and before he does that he has to make his way through a crowded corridor, and so on and so on. Like the paradox of Xeno's Arrow, the messenger is stifled by the concept of infinity, and cannot move an inch.

RM: What are some of the challenges in adapting Kafka for the stage?

GL: Kafka's narrative voice is very strong. Most adaptations of his work end up putting Kafka as a character on stage, which doesn't happen with adaptations of, say, Dickens or George Eliot. The narrator in Kafka is a very invasive presence, shaping every aspect of the reader's experience of the story. Kafka is a master in directing your eye as you read and construct images.

DS: You assume that characters are in a certain posture, and then you realize two paragraphs later that they're actually in each other's arms or in some other unknowable place.

GL: There's an episode in The Trial, for example, when K. is talking to a woman and only at the end of a five-page dialogue does the narrator reveal that the woman is sitting on K.'s lap. The entire scene gets recontextualized. Kafka constantly destabilizes the reader's response to conversations, to physical gestures, to place, to character.

RM: Could you give an example from Amerika?

GL: When we first meet Klara, one of the novel's young girls, she seems like a Dickens heroine, naïve, sweet, and pure. Suddenly she does something totally surprising; she throws herself at Karl and almost rapes him. Every other line of hers is sweet or manipulative or violent. It's disconcerting - you never know whom or what to trust, but it can be hilarious. We don't want to put Kafka on stage - that never works for me - but we have to find a theatrical vocabulary that gives our audience that same sense of disorientation. What looks like a simple situation turns out to be much more complicated. A solid-looking wall can simply evaporate.

DS: Video will help us here. The video camera can go inside the action and see it from a different perspective than the audience does. Video will also allow us to completely alter the scenery the audience is looking at; projection onto any surface can transform the environment. It can also make Karl appear and disappear.

RM: Karl's journey is arduous and at times degrading, but as you say, it's also very funny. How would you describe Kafka's sense of humor?

GL: Kafka adored physical comedy. He also understood that the greatest sight gags are born from anguish. We know that Kafka was a fan of Keaton and Chaplin; he also learned about the grotesque from Dickens. Dickens pushes the ordinary to extremes. He takes a small physical idea and expands it to such an extent that it becomes hilarious. Kafka stole many of his tricks of characterization and staging; suitcases appear and vanish, Karl loses his suit in an instant, or is bullied by the gigantic, immensely strong Head Porter, so huge he becomes grotesque.

DS: Kafka is a trickster, but a sad one. He's funniest when the situation is desperate. When he began the novel the old civilizations of Europe were in tatters and the First World War was just around the corner. It's hardly surprising that he should be dreaming of life in a New World.

GL: A New World that looks remarkably like the old one - everyone Karl meets is a refugee from Pomerania or Bohemia, Ireland or France. It's another challenge in adapting the book for the stage; we can never be sure what language anyone is speaking.

DS: The shadow of war, and the depression, is everywhere in the book. It reminds me of something my father taught me; at some point, everyone becomes someone else's tyrant.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.'s Associate Dramaturg.