Before I went to this Kafka on the Shore, I felt the need to check out what people had written about it. I love Steppenwolf and have been attending plays there for years. Some are old regulars like The Cherry Orchard or Hedda Gabler, but this year they have become more modern and it is exciting. Sometimes I do read about the play beforehand; sometimes, I don’t even read the program, wanting it to be a surprise. The title intrigued me. Was it a play about Kafka? Was it a play emulating Kafka’s themes?
Kafka was an olds literary friend from my days of philosophy and angst. I first read Franz Kafka in my freshman year in college and I dove into it with epiphany and relief. It is certainly an appropriate age to understand hunger, angst, torture and despair. I was also enjoying Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Sartre’s bizarre love triangle with Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren. I miss the days where I first discovered how connected one could feel to a writer long gone, the days where I was certain the story was looking right at me insisting “This is for you!” I remember thinking that Kakfa had it right-that bureaucracy allowed terrible atrocities to occur. I remember being fascinated by the Hunger Artist and how people paid money to see someone starve to death. I remember thinking that that was so like life.
The reviews of Kafka on the Shore were mixed. One man said, “Too complicated. It made me angry.” A response to that was “Calm down. It’s just a play.” I understand both perspectives. Sometimes plays make me remarkably angry. I feel imprisoned by the theater, a captive audience. I understand how ridiculous that statement is. I think I actually enjoy the absurdity of the statement. I sometimes feel tortured by the playwright, by the director, by the actors. Not this time. This time, I embraced the absurdity, the fantasy, the dreamlike, lifelike mingling that danced scene to scene.
The main character, aptly named Kafka, was in angst indeed. He was a wanderer. His world was filled with uncoincidental coincidences. People who came into his life were absolutely necessary in timing and in meaning. A chance encounter with a librarian find him his long lost mother. All the other characters in the play trust the absurdity of each others odd truths. A truck driver believes an odd little man who is looking for a large white very meaningful rock that separates two worlds. Colonel Sanders (an actual character) is actually a killer of cats who keeps cats heads in his freezer; he is looking for a protégé to finish him off so he can end this meaningless existence. It is a play laden with oddities and assumptions that everything is true and yet everything is untrue. I left wondering what was supposed to be a dream and what was supposed to be real. More importantly, I left with questions, big wonderful questions.
Before I went to this Kafka on the Shore, I felt the need to check out what people had written about it. I love Steppenwolf and have been attending plays there for years. Some are old regulars like The Cherry Orchard or Hedda Gabler, but this year they have become more modern and it is exciting. Sometimes I do read about the play beforehand; sometimes, I don’t even read the program, wanting it to be a surprise. The title intrigued me. Was it a play about Kafka? Was it a play emulating Kafka’s themes?
Kafka was an olds literary friend from my days of philosophy and angst. I first read Franz Kafka in my freshman year in college and I dove into it with epiphany and relief. It is certainly an appropriate age to understand hunger, angst, torture and despair. I was also enjoying Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Sartre’s bizarre love triangle with Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren. I miss the days where I first discovered how connected one could feel to a writer long gone, the days where I was certain the story was looking right at me insisting “This is for you!” I remember thinking that Kakfa had it right-that bureaucracy allowed terrible atrocities to occur. I remember being fascinated by the Hunger Artist and how people paid money to see someone starve to death. I remember thinking that that was so like life.
The reviews of Kafka on the Shore were mixed. One man said, “Too complicated. It made me angry.” A response to that was “Calm down. It’s just a play.” I understand both perspectives. Sometimes plays make me remarkably angry. I feel imprisoned by the theater, a captive audience. I understand how ridiculous that statement is. I think I actually enjoy the absurdity of the statement. I sometimes feel tortured by the playwright, by the director, by the actors. Not this time. This time, I embraced the absurdity, the fantasy, the dreamlike, lifelike mingling that danced scene to scene.
The main character, aptly named Kafka, was in angst indeed. He was a wanderer. His world was filled with uncoincidental coincidences. People who came into his life were absolutely necessary in timing and in meaning. A chance encounter with a librarian find him his long lost mother. All the other characters in the play trust the absurdity of each others odd truths. A truck driver believes an odd little man who is looking for a large white very meaningful rock that separates two worlds. Colonel Sanders (an actual character) is actually a killer of cats who keeps cats heads in his freezer; he is looking for a protégé to finish him off so he can end this meaningless existence. It is a play laden with oddities and assumptions that everything is true and yet everything is untrue. I left wondering what was supposed to be a dream and what was supposed to be real. More importantly, I left with questions, big wonderful questions.
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