The process takes 12 hours altogether. And the condemned man is never told beforehand why this is happening to him.
That instrument of annihilation sprang from the toxically fertile mind of Franz Kafka, who made it the centerpiece of his great short story “In the Penal Colony.” A subject of interpretive debate throughout the century since the work was first published, this infernal machine has now been reassembled — in the form of a computerized control board — on a tiny stage in the East Village, at Next Door at the New York Theater Workshop.
In this case, it would appear, its torturous operation takes considerably longer than half a day. As reimagined by writer and director Miranda Haymon — in a short, sharp shock of a play also called “In the Penal Colony,” which opened Thursday night — Kafka’s mechanical death dealer is applied to black American men for the duration of their lifetimes.
Or that’s the way I saw it. This three-actor, hourlong production is willfully opaque, lacking the crystalline detail provided by Kafka. And theatergoers unfamiliar with the story that inspired Haymon’s play will be hard-pressed to figure out her metaphoric interpretation of an intricate, metaphoric source.
What is clear is that young, vigorous black men — portrayed by Jamar Brathwaite, David Glover and Dhari Noel — are performing an excruciating, impeccably coordinated and implicitly endless series of physical exercises for an audience’s entertainment. Does this sound familiar, sports fans?
This summoning of a spectator’s guilt is underscored by Emmie Finckel’s set, which suggests a stylized basketball court, and by Valentine Monfeuga’s hip-hop soundscape punctuated by the screech of referee’s whistles. Before the show’s end, its performers will all have consumed vast quantities of what appears to be a Smurf-blue sports drink. They do so in one sustained gulp per bottle, as if conditioned to force feed themselves.
Occasionally, the actors — who enter singing Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” — will recite passages from Kafka’s story. They have been assigned the roles of three of that tale’s principal characters: the Officer ( Brathwaite), who operates the killing machine and is its most passionate advocate; the detached Traveler ( Noel) from another land; and the Condemned (Glover), who says nothing but does what he is told.
That is, until near the show’s end, when Glover steps out to directly address the audience in a monologue of remonstrance. “I exist for your viewership,” he says by way of introduction. “Your seal of approval.”
It’s a speech that brings to mind the final section of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview.” Earlier sequences often made me think of the inescapable purgatory of James Ijames’ “Kill Move Paradise.”
Because Haymon’s play lacks the cumulative clarity of those works — and never successfully synthesizes its disparate symbolic elements — it doesn’t register with the same gut punch of impact. It often feels like an ambitious student project, inspired by other contemporary works and awaiting further refinement.
But it makes its own earnest contribution to the expanding field of the vital, racially themed theater of discomfort that is flourishing these days. The final words of Glover’s fraught soliloquy baldly ask questions that echo subliminally throughout plays by Haymon’s peers: “Can you hear me now? Are you listening? Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? Come and help. Come and help. Come and help. Come and help.”
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Production Notes:
‘In the Penal Colony’
Through July 28 at the Fourth Street Theater, Manhattan; 212-460-5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour.
Credits: Written and directed by Miranda Haymon; lighting by Cha See; sound by Valentine Monfeuga; sets by Emmie Finckel; props by Holden Gunster; production manager, Itzel Ayala; stage manager, Jessica Emmanus. Presented by Next Door at New York Theater Workshop.
Cast: Jamar Brathwaite (The Officer), David Glover (The Condemned) and Dhari Noel (The Traveler).
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.