Students metamorphose Kafka stories into original play.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

John Schmor doesn't look much like a weightlifter, but he sure thinks like one. And he clearly believes that heavy lifting will be good for his theater students at the University of Oregon.

"I think it's good for them to struggle with the main creative choices that playwrights and directors face," says Schmor, an assistant professor of theater arts.

This year, that has meant reading more than 50 short stories by Franz Kafka - the popular but difficult Austrian-Czech writer who died in 1924 - and then selecting some pieces, turning them into an original theatrical work and presenting it on stage.

This process of building something theatrical from a text not written for the stage is called "devised theater." It takes time, and it's not easy, which is one reason University Theatre undertakes such a project only every other year.

The first one, staged in 2003, was "This Ship of Fools," a vaudeville extravaganza based on the novel ``Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools)'' by Sebastian Brant.

This year it's ``Kafka Parables,'' which will have its premiere Friday.

``We wanted something totally devised, and more textual than `This Ship of Fools,' '' says Schmor, who has a special interest in Kafka.

He chose Kafka's shortest stories - there were more than 50 for the students to select from - because these parables were more open to student interpretation than texts such as "Metamorphosis" or "The Trial," and because, unlike other material, these are "texts that are defying solutions."

After reading and selecting stories and diary excerpts to work with, Schmor and the students in his play development course next had to figure out how to connect the stories and integrate all 15 actors, using both their characters and the context to stitch the stories together.

"We didn't start with the history," Schmor says. "Kafka told us how to organize the material."

Slowly, teacher and students shaped "Kafka Parables" into a first act about lonely people in a big modern city, with "little hints of trouble" foreshadowing a second act about "police surveillance, subversive groups, imprisonment, torture and finally war, all played off the city stories."

But the students did not ignore history, either. Each student had research to do.

Some students found people in the community who knew two Yiddish songs and the original Czech national anthem (Bedrich Smetana's ``Ma Vlast''), then learned the music and taught it to their classmates.

Others researched the period leading up to World War I, using books such as "The Proud Tower" and "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman. Others looked into Kafka's interest in Kabbalah, Jewish mystical tradition.

Kafka's father and mother "denied their Judaism," Schmor says, but he embraced it. Scholars such as Gershom Scholem saw kabbalistic influences in Kafka's writing.

Kafka spent almost his entire life isolated in Prague, where an old Jewish community existed alongside Czech nationalists and Germans who saw themselves as part of the German empire. Some of Kafka's diary entries from just before World War I were "almost prophetic" about the fate of the Jewish people, Schmor says.

"It's amazing the things he noticed, so haunting."

Working with Kafka's texts and their social-historical context, the students "learned what historical research could be doing for them" as actors.

"It's important to get outside our own traditions sometimes," Schmor says.

Having completed the classroom phase of the project, the students began rehearsals in March.

"We hit the wall," Schmor says. There were still decisions to be made, and the students had to make them together, with lots of give and take.

"Most actors prefer to be either the star or a bit player - it's safer," Schmor says. "They're not used to working collaboratively. But they need these skills if they're going to work in new-play development."

Some of his students are excited by this challenge and others are terrified, Schmor says. But the show is coming along.

Some of the scenes are surreal. "The Vulture," a famous Kafka parable about a living man whose feet are being ripped to shreds by a carrion bird, is told two ways. A passerby offers to get his gun and shoot the vulture, but he says it will take about half an hour. He asks whether the man can wait that long.

In one version, the victim is a woman working in a sweatshop, where "work is the vulture and the boss is the good samaritan," Schmor says. The second time, the man is a dying soldier and the vulture that can be eliminated with one shot is his pain.

Other stories are "pretty literal illustrations," Schmor says. In "Fratricide," for example, all the lines are spoken by a woman conducting a murder trial, while the story is acted out behind her.

The show also involves funny stories, strange characters, music, sound and lots of movement. Walter Kennedy, a UO assistant professor of dance, has worked with the cast and crew through the developmental stages and into rehearsal. He has choreographed two stories that serve as codas to each act.

The design team working with Schmor and Kennedy includes Jamie LeBlanc (sets), Alexandra Bonds (costumes), Rachel Kinsman (lighting), Jay Hash (sound), Janet Rose (technical director) and Jerry Hooker (scenic designer).

Noting that the show has "a very oral storytelling" style, Schmor expressed some concern about audience reaction.

"We're such a visual culture," he says. "Some have a taste for listening, and others don't."

The cast includes Alexander Dupre, Tedra Engle, Gregory Heaton, Derek Johnson, Mary Jungels, Teresa Koberstein, Daren Lundeen, Sergio Martinez, Katie McEntee, Michael Miranda, Lauren Olsen, Adam Rieders, Jana Schmieding, Scott Stewart and Kyle Warren.

"The set is a large abandoned warehouse," Schmor says. "We wanted flexibility and a sense of storage, or memory, suggesting histories that get lost, and secrets we go to our deathbeds with."

THEATER PREVIEW

Kafka Parables

What: An original staging based on Franz Kafka short stories and diary excerpts

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, May 13-28; also 7:30 p.m. May 19 and 2 p.m. May 22

Where: Robinson Theatre, 1109 Old Campus Lane

Tickets: $12 for the general public; $9 for senior citizens, UO faculty and staff and non-UO students; $7 for ages 18 and under; $5 for UO students, through the Erb Memorial Union (346-4363) or, on performance nights, Robinson Theatre (346-4191)

CAPTION(S):

Sergio Martinez (left), Teresa Koberstein and Alexander Dupre find this part of "Kafka Parables" uplifting.