A Review
of Philip Glass' New Opera "In the Penal Colony"
Modern
art might be defined by its integration of conventionally separate artistic
genres. Still, in this age of artistic innovation, I doubt many composers
would think to make an opera out of a Franz Kafka story. Yet that is what
Philip Glass has done in his new opera theater work of "In the Penal Colony."
Glass' opera recently premiered in Seattle, in a production directed by
JoAnne Akalaitis that will appear at Chicago's Court Theater from November
1 through early December. The Seattle premiere demonstrated that Glass'
idea, to set an operatic telling of a Kafka story to a modern composition
for string quintet, was inspired. "In the Penal Colony" turns out to be
more than an unlikely and beautiful presentation of one of Kafka's darker
parables. It also offers up some timely and disquieting truths about the
evolution of the human spirit in the past Century. It is as if Glass has
brought Kafka out, dusted him off, and introduced him to a Twentieth Century
he never met, yet already seemed to know.
The short story of "In the Penal Colony"
is a dark parable told in Kafka's simple and deceptively innocent trademark
style. In it an officer at a penal colony entertains a visitor with a
demonstration of "the harrow," a killing machine invented by the former
commander of the colony. The occasion for the demonstration execution
is the conviction of one of the colony's soldiers of the crime of falling
asleep at his post. The harrow consists of a bed to which the soldier
will be strapped down, whereupon hundreds of needles will repeatedly inscribe
the judgment against him deeper and deeper into his body. After twelve
hours of this torture he will bleed to death and the harrow will dump
his body into an earthen pit. One of the haunting aspects of Kafka's story
is that its focus is neither the soldier, nor even the morality of his
execution, but the machine that will execute him.
The story is also infused with Kafka's direct
presentation of a fairly incomprehsible and horrific state of affairs.
In answer to the visitor's inquiries, the officer casually explains that
the matter of a formal charge and trial are irrelevant because the soldier
is presumed guilty, and in any case will experience his judgment "on his
body," where he can "decipher it with his wounds." When the officer produces
a parchment which he claims sets forth the judgment to be inscribed on
the soldier's body, the visitor finds it inscrutable. The officer takes
this in stride, laughing that "it's no calligraphy for schoolchildren."
"In the Penal Colony" also displays Kafka's
genius for gruesome detail. Not only are the details of the harrow's operation
truly awful, even sickening, the officer forthrightly presents them with
sincere pride, as if he were a child showing off an expensive toy. The
visitor's situation forces him to assess the extent to which he is morallly
responsible for the apparently senseless murder he is about to witness.
The visitor, wondering what exactly his role is with respect to what he
is witnessing, balances his obligation to his own morals with his objective
role as a supposedly disinterested observer. Thus he faces a very modern
dilemma.
The story also features the officer's explanation
of the history of the harrow, that it was the invention of the colony's
former commander, recently replaced by a new commander who appears intent
on a kind of slow reform. The new commander refuses, for example, to replace
the harrow's parts when they fail, and he doesn't attend the executions.
As he reaches the conclusion of his explanation, the officer attempts
to enlist the visitor's support for the harrow, recounting the glory days
of the old commander's rule, when executions were treated as festive public
events and the officer, with the children of the colony gathered around
him, "profoundly took in the transfigured expression from the tortured
face" of the accused. In Kafka's story, the officer rejoices in this memory:
"How intensely our cheeks basked in the glow of that justice, attained
at long last and already fading! What wonderful times, my friend!"
The story seems to offer a bleak moral in
its resolution. When the visitor finally announces that he cannot condone
the harrow, the officer, in resignation, liberates the condemned soldier,
programs the harrow to inscribe a new judgment ("Be Just!") and places
himself in the machine, under its descending needles. But in executing
the officer the harrow slowly self-destructs. The officer and the harrow
perish together, but the officer dies without any sign of redemption.
"The officer," Kafka writes, "had not found what all the others had found
in the machine."
After the officer's execution, the visitor
enters the colony and visits the grave of the former commander, which
bears an inscription prophesying the former commander's triumphant return.
This discovery convinces the visitor to leave early. Upon leaving the
island, the visitor keeps two soldiers who wish to join him at bay by
threatening them with a heavy rope he finds on the floor of the row boat
that carries him to his waiting ship.
Glass' operatic rendition of Kafka's story
is as straightforward and direct as the original. The members of the string
quintet (two violins, viola, cello and double bass) perform a driving
composition in Glass' signature style. It is dark and beautiful, slightly
more melodic and less repetitive than one might expect from Glass. The
music, in fact, finds a perfect balance between the hope it would like
to offer the visitor and the grim service it owes the officer. It fills
the background of the opera perfectly, darkening the story without overwhelming
it.
Akalaitis' open stage is dominated by the
harrow, in her conception a towering metal frame covered in a shroud that
is painted with the shadows of cogs and levers projected from its unseen
interior. The harrow and its dingy beige shroud loom over the set. There
is a rock wall behind the harrow and the players, and a set of folding
chairs in the foreground. The members of the string quintet wear what
might be penal colony uniforms, but what also might be concentration camp
standard issue. The entire set is done in black and muted browns and greys.
With the entrance of the officer (Herbert
Perry) and the visitor (John Duykers), the tenor and bass-baritone for
whom Glass wrote the work, the opera begins to tell its story. Rudolph
Wurlitzer's libretto follows and to some extent adopts Kafka's text. Against
the string quintet's relentless dirge of sixteenth notes, the officer
explains the harrow's operation, and he and the visitor engage in the
colloquy that moves the parable toward its conclusion. In operatic form,
the officer's questions and the visitor's explanations are perfectly stilted
for the telling of an unsettling parable about the dehumanization of mankind's
devotion to technology and efficiency. Thus the operatic form and Glass'
repetitive compositional style turn out to be an inspired combination.
The effect is something like in Glass' film Koyaanisqatsi, in which we
confront, in driving and repetitious musical phrases, an uncomfortable
message about ourselves. It works perfectly in bringing Kafka's prose
to life.
Akalaitis' innovation was to make Kafka
himself a character in the production. He is played here by Jose Gonzalez.
Even before the house lights have dimmed, Kafka's voice appears over the
loudspeakers, reciting fragments from Kafka's diaries. Thus slightly bewildered
theatergoers take their seats trying to locate the disembodied voice that
is saying such welcoming things as "if I shouted into this day, it would
have a disgusting echo," and "two children, alone in their house, climbed
into a large trunk. The lid slammed shut and they were suffocated."
Akalaitis' Kafka character doesn't actually
take part in the story, but instead acts outside of it, from a bed of
his own in the foreground that somehow conveys the claustrophobia of Kafka's
room in his father's house. Kafka here is a meta-character, sometimes
stopping the action to read fragments from his diaries, sometimes joining
the action. In one striking scene Kafka reads diary entries from under
the shroud of the harrow. At another point, while the harrow operates
in the background, Kafka joins the other characters in a mechanized dance.
In one of the production's more beautiful and ironic touches, the text
of Kafka's diaries is super-imposed on the set, bathing the stage and
the actors in Kafka's handwriting.
Kafka's presence as a character is also
the only aspect of the production that doesn't always work. Kafka's character
and the action of the opera are not always perfectly integrated, for example,
perhaps the inevitable result of Akalaitis imposing Kafka's presence on
top off an already complete story. Some of Kafka's pronouncements from
his diary, furthermore, verge on sounding silly. Kafka the character is,
after all, reading diary fragments the real Kafka may not have intended
to present to the world as art. There is also the thin line between anxiety
and parody that gave Woody Allen his career. All of these factors produce
moments when Kafka the character looks like the device Akalaitis had made
of him. On the whole, however, his presence effectively lifts the opera
out of its literary and historical context, making it a more effective
allegory for the dehumanization of the Twentieth Century's fascination
with and devotion to technology.
More than anything else, the Seattle premiere
of "In the Penal Colony" conveyed the amazing timelessness and insight
of Kafka's 1914 story. The Twentieth Century confirmed Kafka's claim of
humanity's tendency to forsake itself for technology, efficiency and what
it considers progress. Glass' opera stands as a thoughtful tribute to
this horror. The Seattle production of "In the Penal Colony" also suggests
that, in composing the opera, Glass saw Kafka's story as a vehicle for
examining some of our darkest vulnerabilities from the dual perspective
of the beginning and end of the past century. That an opera of a Kafka
short story would turn out to be such an instructive and intellectually
enjoyable theater experience is a tribute to Glass' own kind of foresight.
Photo credits for Glass picture: © LaCoppola &
Meier, 2000.
Photo credits for pictures of scores: © Dunvagen Music Publishing,
Inc., 2000.
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