This world premiere of an opera by Philip Glass, based on a story by Franz Kafka and directed by Joanne Akalaitis, was bound to be a theatrical "event" based on those credentials alone. But the piece is misbegotten: an opera from a story that derives no benefit from being musicalized; a staging of materials more interesting to hear than see; and a fusion of two tales–the one Kafka wrote and the one he lived–that simply refuse to belong together.
Moreover, the story he wrote-about a machine which literally administers the law, carving its words into the bodies of transgressors until they bleed to death–is, like most Kafka, as ludicrous as it is terrifying. It cries out to be presented not as horrible but as horrifically funny. But the only sense of humor here seems to belong to set designer John Conklin, whose machine is a Rube Goldberg contraption shrouded in a yellow shower curtain. Everyone else is unrelentingly grim; the press release even uses the phrase "man's unblinking inhumanity to man." It's like watching an Amnesty International commercial.
Don't get me wrong: Amnesty International is good. Torture is bad. But Kafka understood the power of comedy to convey grim subjects the way sobriety often can't, a lesson Akalaitis and her team would do well to learn. Instead, they give us unrelieved agony as a Visitor (sung ably by Kenneth Gayle at the performance I saw, and by John Duykers at others) observes the machine's application to a hapless Condemned Man (Steven Rishard, silent but conveying panic through every pore) and hears it justified by an Officer (bass-baritone Herbert Perry, alternating with Eugene Perry) whom it ultimately kills.
Kafka himself (the excellent Jose J. Gonzales) is onstage throughout the piece, reciting excerpts from his journals which strongly suggest that physical pain wasn't his subject at all. This existential version of the story, in which awkward physical positions (Kafka's no less than the prisoner's) illustrate that life is an impossible contortion, is actually a lot more interesting: it makes the Officer's insane devotion to the "Old Commander" who designed the killing machine a Kafka slam on worship, whether of the merciless Old Testament God or of the forgiving New Testament version who accomplishes His purpose by torturing His son.
But the inclusion of both interpretations makes the evening seem less complex than confused. If torture is really the subject, what is Kafka doing on stage at all? His neurasthenia seems trivial by comparison: he's no more entitled to equate his depression with capital punishment than Sylvia Plath was to equate her mean father with the Holocaust.
Kafka's presence does allow for some clever mirror images, as when he and the Visitor obsessively wash their hands in sync: who needs to be so fastidious, and about what? And when all the characters pull up chairs, face the 5-piece chamber orchestra and watch it play, Akalaitis produces an eerie echo of "Playing for Time," the film about concentration camp prisoners' playing music for their guards. In that one moment, she somehow manages to knit the individual and political halves of the evening together in a way nothing else ever does.
Glass' reputation notwithstanding, the most accessible part of the work is the score. It may well be worth re-hearing. The play itself, though, needs re-thinking before it's ready to be seen.