It wouldn't be at all amiss to encapsulate Franz Kafka's masterpiece, Metamorphosis, by way of a joke: Did you hear the one about the traveling salesman who turned into a cockroach? For that is precisely what happens to commercial salesman Gregor Samsa in the opening page of the book, as he wakes up to discover he has turned into a monstrous vermin, unable to turn over in his bed, aghast at the new changes in his person.
Published in 1915 but not translated into English until 1937, Kafka's novel succeeds, relentlessly, by its pitch-black humor and its fable-like thrust. What's so funny about Gregor's absurd, heinous condition is that both his and his family's concerns are the same ordinary petty ones they would have had had Gregor merely woken with a bad case of flu. What will everyone think, or say? How will he get to work? Can he get to work? Who will support the family? What does he eat?
Vladimir Nabokov, no stranger himself to tenebrous humor, counted Metamorphosis among his favorite works and among the few world-class masterpieces of literature. In fact, one New York television reviewer announced that the current Broadway production starring Mikhail Baryshnikov was "Art with a capital A."
Now, when television reviewers call something "Art with a capital A," we'd all best sit up and take notice. Certainly audiences have. Baryshnikov's Metamorphosis broke the house record in its first week. Audiences, of which many, one suspects, haven't even heard of Kafka prior to this, stand up and cheer. Can this production, adapted and directed by Steven Berkoff, be so revolutionary? So intensely moving?
Well, no.
Metamorphosis, in its current state, so to speak, is a vehicle specifically for Baryshnikov, who, having seen the Paris production with film director Roman Polanski playing the unfortunate Gregor, was anxious to play Gregor as well, if a suitable adaptation could be written. (The Berkoff adaptation, though, first saw the light of day twenty years ago, in London.) Berkoff, an actor himself, has been more than sympathetic to the situation, and he highlights his star every chance he gets. But apart from being the kind of show by which occasional theater-goers and tourists can be impressed--it features the most famous dancer of our day and therefore must be brilliant, must be Art with a capital A--this Metamorphosis, at one hundred minutes and without the mercy of an intermission, is often an astonishing bore.
What Business?
Of course the question might well be asked what business a theatrical adaptation of Kafka's work has doing on Broadway in a form other than dance. The drama in Metamorphosis is, apart form a few shifts of circumstance related to the family, mostly interior and, not surprisingly, suited to the novel form. Ironically, Berkoff has pared down Kafka's text (if any author didn't need paring down it's Kafka!), substituting a burlesque version of his own, which misses along the way not only some of the text's subtleties, but also points that Kafka took pains to drive home, such as that a change in one family member causes a drastic change in the entire unit.
In line with the eroding approach Berkoff has taken, the
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