AMERIKAFKA(chik)
Opening October 11, 2002

AmeriKafka (chik) is a play in the manner of Peer Gynt and Ghost Sonata. It explores the fantastical side of our interior life and the use of imagination to ward off our fears and mortality.

The play begins the minute after Franz Kafka has died. Kafka, however, resists his death, as an angry dybbuk would, and must come to new terms with three unresolved aspects of his life - his unfinished novel Amerika, his broken engagement and relationship to women, and his lust to be part of something greater than himself. It is through his true-life experience of Yiddish Theatre that he is able to break out of his own shell and make a leap into this new imaginary realm.

He is taken on a journey by Itzhak Lowy, the leader of a downtrodden Yiddish Theatre troupe, through time and space, through a free-wheeling adaptation of his novel, through Song of Songs, through the history of Yiddish Theatre which faces extinction... returning to the moment of his death. But he fights easy answers and fights for the integrity of his individual truth - be it modern, alienated or absurd.