How perfect that Buntport is reviving Kafka on Ice – first produced in 2004, and one of my favorite of the company’s many inventive works – as part of a citywide celebration of all things Czech. First, because Franz Kafka is the Czech author best known in this country, with legions of schoolkids guided every year through his novella, The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle. And second, because the Buntporters’ sensibility, humor, use of objects and puppets, bare-bones tech and ways of playing with physical size and perception are so very Czech. When, for instance, Kafka sends one of his stories to a woman he loves, in her hands it unfolds into the paper figure of a man, with which she then dances. “The work does well with her,” he observes. The beetle itself takes many forms in this show, from an elongated shadow to an actor in a big, huggy felt costume. In one frenetic scene, it morphs from a hand puppet into a plastic remote-controlled toy that skitters frantically around the stage.

There’s a brilliant mix of genres and parodies on show as well, from a flirty, meet-cute, silent-movie-style ice-skating scene (oh, yes, everyone except Kafka himself skates through this) to a high-stepping parody of the Yiddish theater the author attended with a friend.

The script of Kafka on Ice is unchanged from the first iteration, and yet the show felt different this time around – still intensely funny, yet sadder, too. Critics talk about how the plight of poor Gregor – trapped and isolated in his ugly carapace, terrified of his father and reliant on the intermittent kindness of his sister, slowly sickening until, to the relief of his family, he quietly expires – reflects Kafka’s despairing view of his own existence. Buntport intertwines this plot with pieces of Kafka’s other writings and events from his life, and while I remember some glimmers of transcendence last time, they now seem to have vanished. Perhaps in part because Josh Hartwell has taken over the role of Kafka from Gary Culig and makes him more baffled, gentle and unhappy; perhaps because the entire ensemble – all the other performers are the same – has matured and changed in indefinable ways.

But with this production, I was more aware of a parallel theme, one that carried a fragment of hope. An author’s work is never really his own, nor is his life. Kafka on Ice explores the transformations and permutations Kafka’s work and reputation went through in the years following his death – including this production itself. In one hilarious scene, Erin Rollman plays a somewhat dim teacher trying to explain symbolism with the aid of a soulless educational cheat sheet. In another, lepidopterist and major literary figure Vladimir Nabokov (Erik Edborg) gives his scholarly opinion on just what kind of creature Gregor Samsa transformed into. But there’s also a quietly powerful interlude in which a voice in the dark simply reads the beginning of the story. The lights come up, and we see a schoolboy walking slowly across the stage, book in hand. Every now and then Kafka/Gregor’s existential loneliness gets broken – by a sudden embrace from the charlady, for example, outrageously played by Evan Weissman in a maid’s outfit. (I took this as a manifestation of Weissman’s essential kindliness, since the charlady in the actual book is a pretty rough character.)

Before he died, Kafka asked his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his work. Brod didn’t – an obvious betrayal. But what I’d missed before and definitely noticed this time around was a certain depth to Brian Colonna’s Brod, and words that justified an action that not only preserved Kafka’s priceless literary legacy, but in some sense rescued his soul.

-Juliet Wittman, February 2, 2011, Westword

More than once during the Buntport Theater’s Kafka on Ice, the character of Franz Kafka (played by Josh Hartwell) comments on how stupid it is to stage an ice-capade revolving around his life and work. “It’s inappropriate!” he protests. As justification, toward the end of the play, another character offers up an aphorism once penned by Kafka himself (most likely about himself): “He runs after facts like a beginner learning to skate, who, furthermore, practices somewhere where it is forbidden.”

It’s an interesting way to tie it together – but it’s telling, and pretty awesome, that the Buntport troupe didn’t dig up that quote until after they’d decided to put Kafka on ice.

The inspiration for the play, it’s fairly well known, was actually the ice itself. “We were teaching a class, Evan [Weissman], Erin [Rollman] and I,” says troupe member Hannah Duggan, who helped adapt the show an plays several characters in it, “and one of our students was like, ‘I have a skating rink in my back yard,’ and we’re like, ‘no you don’t.'”

As it turned out, that student’s father was a manufacturer of synthetic ice, which Duggan describes as “plastic with Armor-All sprayed on it,” and the Buntport decided they had to do something with it. “So we thought, well, what could we do on ice? And Kafka just seemed like the best choice. Just because it seems so not on ice. It really couldn’t be less.”

In a weird Buntport way, this makes perfect sense.

That was all back in 2004, when the production was first staged – soon after, the fake ice, along with all the production’s setpieces and costumes, was stolen, and the show was gone – but not forgotten by anyone that got to see it or even hear about it. For good reason: It’s bizarre, hilarious, heartbreaking, brilliant and silly; as Westword own Juliet Wittman wrote back when it was first staged, “It’s safe to say that no one else – anywhere – is doing theater like this.” And that’s still pretty much true. Now, with the help of some generous benefactors who helped the company acquire a new sheet of ice, it’s back. And you’re a fool if you don’t go see it.

A big part of what makes this play so striking and different is the way that it’s set up. The set design is bracingly minimalist: Just a room with the fake ice in the middle of it, a desk and a couple of creative props: Memorable ones include a tiny model of a bedroom, a remote-control cockroach (you really just have to see it to understand how great this is) and the startlingly beautiful use of a large sheet.

Like Kafka, the Bunport spends this show running after the facts of his life like beginners learning to skate – literally: When they decided to do this show, nobody could skate. “We still don’t really know how,” Duggan jokes, “but we do anyway.” Still, while it’s interesting, that quote is hardly a necessary justification. After all, Kafka had a famous penchant for the bizarre and the surreal, for placing straight-man characters in the middle of absurd insanity – and if the play’s underlying argument that Kafka’s characteristic straight-man character was really Kafka himself is true, then maybe Kafka would have appreciated these proceedings more than even the play itself admits.

-Jef Otte, January 31, 2011, Westword Blog

The parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on both sides of the street. Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is being turned away at the front desk: “I’m sorry. We’re all sold out.” When I first visited this place a few years ago, there were seven or eight people in attendance, including myself and my friend. Now word must be out that this is the place to be on Saturday night: Buntport Theater, the opening of Kafka on Ice.

We find seats and settle in to clip-cloppy, ’30s-style music that sounds like the Charleston. We’re going to be close enough to the action to see the sweat shine on the actors’ faces. There are rows of chairs on all four sides of a green square of artificial ice – not gleaming ice-rink stuff, but something that looks like ancient linoleum, scratched and scuffed.

What on earth do these people at Buntport think they’re doing? Franz Kafka is a melancholy figure, a Prague-dwelling German Czech, steeped in the history of his time, the creator of a dwindling, despairing art. Not noisily or grandly despairing, but art that’s a kind of falling away, a hopeless whispering, the toneless song of Josephine the Mouse Singer, the silent melting of flesh from bone in The Hunger Artist, an art of terror, self-loathing and wordless longing for what can never be attained – and all of it limned in that precise bureaucrat’s prose. Kafka’s best-known works include a novel about a man tried for an act he doesn’t even know has been committed – let alone by him – and ultimately executed. Another describes a castle from which it’s impossible to escape. And then there’s the long short story called The Metamorphosis, which almost every high school student knows and which begins, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

But all of these cheerful Saturday-night people haven’t come here to explore the sorrows of old Europe. They’ve come for a good time. And the Buntporters aren’t exactly known for their worshipful treatment of the classics. But then, they’re not known for denigrating or nullifying or being plain dumb about literature, either. So what are we going to see?

The bouncy music stops. In the darkness that follows, we hear the scritching of a pen on paper, like the sounds of a skate blade on ice. Under the sudden illumination of a single, bare lightbulb, we see Kafka, played by Gary Culig, writing at a desk. Within minutes, the rest of the cast has skated on in impressive unison – yes, wearing real skates – and the show takes off.

Kafka on Ice is part biography. It tells Kafka’s story, about his fear of his overbearing father, his unhappy love life, his friendship with Max Brod, the way in which Gregor Samsa’s predicament represents his own. But it also deals with the way a work like The Metamorphosis changes over time, as it passes through the minds of friends, readers, critics, fellow writers, teachers and tricksters like the Buntport gang. So at one point you have the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov (played by Erik Edborg) arguing that, contrary to some critical opinion, the insect in The Metamorphosis is clearly a beetle, not a cockroach. Then there’s a teacher (a hilarious performance by Erin Rollman) trying to communicate the idea of symbolism to her bored class while peeping periodically at her own cheat notes. The lights go out, and a voice reads a passage aloud in the darkness, bringing clarity and focus to the words. When the lights return, we watch a schoolboy cross the stage with his satchel on his back, reading as he walks.

The Metamorphosis goes through several transmutations: It’s played as farce, as an experiment with objects, as grinning, dancing musical comedy.

Buntport has its own way of dealing with Kafka’s life story. The writer’s meeting with his first love, Felice, is shown as a scene in a silent movie. She falls cutely about on the ice, while he, Chaplin-like, attempts to rescue her – all to the accompaniment of a plinking piano.

This show is anything but Kafkaesque. It’s lighthearted, giddy and goofy. As written, the climax of The Metamorphosis begins with a heartbreaking scene in which Gregor is drawn from his seclusion by the haunting sound of his sister playing the violin. In Kafka on Ice – which has earlier referred to Kafka’s thoughts on his own Jewishness – he hears the violin solo from Fiddler on the Roof.

Buntport creates an Alice in Wonderland world where objects take on their own life and shrink and grow at will. The city of Prague is represented by a pop-up in a book. Gregor Samsa is at one point a glove puppet, seconds later a remote-controlled mechanical toy, and finally, a costumed actor.

There are some really beautiful moments. Kafka sends Felice one of his stories to read; in her hands, it unfurls into the paper figure of a man, and she dances with it. “The writing does quite well with her,” observes Kafka. When Kafka proposes to another love, Milena, his words are made of light, flowing over the rows of audience members, across the ersatz ice and away up the walls. Her response is a calligraphic “Yes.”

I have a couple of quibbles. Every now and then, the script is repetitive. Culig is a good actor, but he has an endearing, vulnerable quality that doesn’t feel quite right for Kafka. Brian Colonna’s Max Brod is pinch-faced, squeaky-voiced and very amusing, but too much of a caricature – both as performed and as conceived. The real Max Brod was far more than a leech who took advantage of Kafka’s fame; he was also the author’s longtime friend and loyal advocate. But all six actors do well. Erik Edborg has to stifle his insanely anarchic instincts to play Kafka’s heavy-handed father, and it works. Evan Weissman’s turn as the charlady (in a uniform that’s pure French maid) is a hoot, as is Hannah Duggan’s determined yet perplexed expression every time she skates across the stage with a flour sack in her mouth (don’t ask). As for Erin Rollman, I don’t have words to describe her performance. She’s a brilliant comic universe unto herself.

All of which explains the crowd in the lobby. It’s safe to say that no one else – anywhere – is doing theater like this.

-Juliet Wittman, October 14, 2004, Westword