To the editors:
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As Justin Hayford in his review of the Turbulent Mirror production of Kafka’s Metamorphosis points out, it resists interpretation [July 6]. The critic who expects coherent interpretation, remains frustrated and angry. Many have pondered the imagery of the Metamorphosis year after year and came to different results and new conclusions, often depending on the current stage in one’s life or historical experience. This writer has made his first contact with Metamorphosis at the age of sixteen in a German gymnasium, 30 years ago, wrote his first staged version 14 years ago and has since performed the play in six countries, at three International Theater Festivals and more than 150 times. I have continued to revise and refine this mysterious masterpiece, to come ever closer to Kafka’s sensitivity. This for me has become analogous for the sensitivity of any responsive artist in this modern and alienated world. I also like to make Kafka’s dream accessible again and again to yet another generation of young audiences.
Far from espousing a “kitchen sink realism which continues to dominate the American scene” (see article by Becca Manery in PerformInk July 5) this production is in the tradition of German expressionism, driving Kafka’s surrealist imagery to its consequent end: the dissolution of language. The other assumption that not realistic theater, though little understood by many critics, has no popular appeal, is also challenged here. The play was chosen best show of the year in Kalamazoo by critic Chisholm Gentry. It was praised by critics in Ann Arbor as “an interesting and absorbing piece of work” with a “keen sensitivity for Kafka’s world” (Jay Carr, Detroit News) and played to two sell-out houses at the University of Chicago. A young student after seeing the play, wrote: “The play forces the mind into analogies. In the concluding line of the play, the narrator speaks of how his sister leaped into the sunlight and stretched her fresh young body, and shows Gregor stretching instead. Because of all that garbage in his room and how they treated him, it will recur and haunt them. This Metamorphosis gives hints of the future where faces are faceless and the value of life is low.”
