Amerikafka

These 13 actors seem to be having such a jolly party that inviting the audience would only have been the polite thing to do. It's nice to see young actors enjoying themselves—mugging, posing, shouting—but it's even nicer to share the joy. Observing occasional flickers of creativity is certainly pleasant; it's more pleasant to know what the heck is going on.

The one thing that's clear about this surrealistic story is that it's about Franz Kafka; what else it might be about is less clear. While dying, or maybe already dead, Kafka dreams up an actor he once knew who helps him write the ending of his unfinished novel as a Yiddish-theater–inspired play. (Fortunately, the program notes indicate that much.) So unfolds a play-within (and-alongside)-a-play about a young Eastern European Jewish man (played by a woman) off to America—that is, in the show's one funny joke, "Americaca." And there are also Kafka's hyperfrenetic, flyswatter-wielding sisters, plus one puppet violinist, two fornicating puppet parents, three actresses playing trumpet-blowing angels in Nebraska, a few atonal songs and some really big masks. All in all, the frenzied action of Hendrickson's high-octane, sometimes imaginative, always hectic hodgepodge can't disguise or compensate for Prestininzi's ornately hollow script.

This company has such an abundance of energy that it's simply wasteful not to expend some of it on an interesting story, resonant ideas or anything more than sporadically attractive stage traffic. Opaque isn't profound; it's just opaque. But apparently it's Trap Door's party, and it'll obfuscate if it wants to.—Novid Parsi