Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Stratford's Alternative Theatre Works is presenting Kafka's Ape, produced by Montreal's Infinitheatre, as a dinner theatre event Oct. 1-5 at The Church Restaurant.
The show is an adaptation by playwright and director Guy Sprung of a Franz Kafka story written during the First World War. It's focus is on man's capacity for brutality and that's delivered through the transformation of a captive ape who learns how to think and act like a human.
The touring play garnered a five-star rating at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto during this year's SummerWorks Performance Festival and Sprung is obviously keen about the coming Stratford staging.
Sprung isn't saying what message audiences may derive from the show but he promises it's highly entertaining and there are many layers to it.
“There's a remarkable performance by an actor that they will come away with and an ironic appreciation of the somewhat limited vision of humankind,” said the director in a Stratford interview earlier this week.
The play is based on Kafka's short story A Report to an Academy (1917) and questions the notion of civilization and what it means to be human in a world of routinized inhumanity.
The story, written as a monologue, tells of a captured simian turned by its keeper into a celebrated variety show act. The primate Redpeter, played by Montreal actor Howard Rosenstein, ends up as a distinguished member of the private security industry.
In place of the "report to an academy" of early 20th century scientists in the original version, Sprung's adaptation has Redpeter present a keynote address to the shareholders of Graywater, a fictitious private military corporation.
Sprung recalled that his major at McGill University was literature and as a student Kafka was of interest to him.
“I always wanted to adapt one of his short stories (for the stage).”
Kafka's Ape emerged from a project that Sprung suggested to a student in a course he was teaching about four years ago at the University of Ottawa.
The student did a play version of Kafka's A Report of an Academy from an on-line translation and it inspired Sprung to do his own translation from the German, and his own adaptation for the stage.
Sprung's father was a battalion commander in the Canadian Army while he was growing up and the playwright credits him in part for the play's perspective.
“This is also from the point of view of someone who thinks that the plethora of mercenary soldiers in the world is one of the diseases of our 21st century.”
“I know that to fight a war for profit and to be paid for it in the way that some of the military societies do would be absolutely anathema to his point of view,” said Sprung.
Rosenstein, who was also in Stratford this week, noted that Kafka saw himself as a person very much isolated from the society he lived in as well as from his family.
“He thought of himself as an animal and first expressed it in The Metamorphosis. He wrote about himself as an insect.”
“By working with this ape who has assimilated himself (as a human) he is talking about his own experience within society and within his family, as a Jew, and as a son who was a disappointment to his father,” said Rosenstein.
“With Guy's translation there are enough laughs to allow the deeper and darker side (of the story) to exist in a way that is not so off-putting you want to run to the exit.”
The irony and humour in the piece is that, as a human, Redpeter is much more of an animal that he ever was as an ape.
“Animals are far less efficient at killing their own species than we are,” remarked Sprung.
Kafka's central thesis in the satire on forced assimilation is that other animals have a dignity and a respect for Mother Nature and their own species that Homo sapiens have lost, says a publicity piece for the show.
"When Kafka first wrote this short story, millions of human beings were coerced into an orgy of killing each other, proving Homo sapiens to be vastly superior to gorillas and chimpanzees when it came to mass murder and genocide. Ironically, one of the largest of the private military corporations doing business with the American government today is called Academi, formerly known as Blackwater.”
“We worked with some really good movement coaches,” said Rosenstein, citing the help he had from Anana Rydvald and Zach Fraser. The other actor in the show is Alex Montagnese who plays Mrs. Redpeter.
It was difficult at first moving like an ape, acknowledged Rosenstein, who has been earning kudos for his performance, but it's “second nature now.”
Rosenstein said the role now feels “channelled” and is part of “the whole mystery of acting.”
Creature makeup design is by Vladamir Cara, and Rosenstein especially credits the makeup artist for the prosthetic teeth he wears for his ape role as a trigger that allowed him to embody Redpeter.
Peggy Coffey, a founder of ATW, credits the The Church Restaurant for stepping up to the plate with what she says is the perfect venue for the performance.
Tickets for the show alone are $15 in person at the door. A buffet dinner before the show is $35 purchased at the restaurant the night of performance.
For buffet dinner reservations call 519-273-3424.
Show dates are Oct. 1-5.
Wednesday to Friday performances begin at 8:30 p.m. following the 6:30 p.m. buffet dinner. Saturday dinner is 7:30 p.m. with the show at 9:30 p.m.
The Sunday buffet brunch with show is 1:30 p.m.
Advance tickets for performances are available online at www.infinitheatre.com
Alternative Theatre Works (ATW) and Infinitheatre last joined forces in Stratford in 2012 to bring Infinitheatre’s Bolsheviki by David Fennario to town.
Stratford Festival actor Robert King played the featured role.
By Donal O’Connor for www.stratfordbeaconherald.com.
Photo: Howard Rosenstein and Guy Sprung. ©2014 Mike Beitz.
2014-09-08
Stratford: Alternative Theatre Works presents "Kafka's Ape" at Church Restaurant October 1-5