Gregor (Ari Jacobson) wakes up to discover he has been transformed into a giant monstrous bug. Photo via Hilsdon Photography LLC
By DCist Contributor Landon Randolph
The adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis currently playing at Woolly Mammoth’s black box stage is performed and produced by a troupe called “Alliance For New Music-Theatre.” Fret not: Alliance has not turned the absurdist classic into a campy musical revue, or replaced the tormented Gregor with Jiminy Cockroach. The production does an excellent job of capturing the eerie humor of Kafka’s original work.
Metamorphosis opens with Gregor (Ari Jacobson) waking up to discover that he has been transformed into a hideous insect. He and his family spend the rest of the play attempting to cope with the situation. Jacobson switches effortlessly back and forth between the quintessential Nice Jewish Boy and a tormented vermin, impressively communicating the change with some contorted posturing and an unsettling clicking noise that gives him the air of a peeved cicada. He skitters over the bare bones set, tormented both by his own self-revulsion and his bitterness that his family is equally repulsed. The result is akin to what would happen if the family from Leave It to Beaver suddenly took up Shabbos and started keeping exotic pets — the perfect family dynamic masking their unease. David Millstone stands out as Gregor’s father, with his puffing, entitled performance, but the whole family is wonderfully self-absorbed. Their pro forma concern for Gregor, undermined by their frustration at him, lends the play much of its humor.
The music comes in the form of a haunting, minimalist score constantly being played under the action, which contributes to the bizarre unease that permeates the play. Cellist Yvonne Caruthers is seated prominently onstage, and accompanies the action with an alienating and evocative series of disjointed notes that seem to come from previously undiscovered parts of the instrument. The actors do occasionally deliver lines in a singsong, but the whole thing is about as far from Rodgers & Hammerstein as you can possibly get, transitioning in turns from a sprightly traditional klezmer sound to a haunting atmospheric melody that seems to rustle across the stage.
The production also makes for an impressive visual display, no mean feat for such a no-frills production. The set consists only of a few ladders and a series of projections, and the way that the characters interact with a variety of people and props rendered as angular line drawings thrown onto the concrete wall behind them exaggerates the awkward and uncomfortable source material. It seems like a small thing, but reducing almost everything onstage to a beam of light incapable of being touched or manipulated gives a physical component to the helplessness of the characters’ situations.
The choice to adapt a previously existing and popular work for the stage often makes more financial than artistic sense (See: Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Actually, maybe don’t). The most artistically successful give you a new appreciation for the original work while walking a fine line between slavish rehash and heretical change. I’m happy to say that Metamorphosis falls solidly in the second group. Not only does the play manage to invoke the spirit of the original work, the experimental staging and the excellent, unconventional score manages to present Kafka’s novel in a new, revelatory light.
Metamorphosisruns at Woolly Mammoth’s black box theater through September 21. Tickets, $30, are available here.
