Theater Performance: "America" based on the novel by Franz Kafka

We’re excited to present a theater performance from the Germany-based Thalia Theater in Kansas City. Join us at the Greenwood Social Hall as they present:

America
Based on the novel by Franz Kafka
In German with English supertitles

Directed by Bastian Kraft
Stage setting by Peter Baur
With Bekim Latifi

“As the sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann, sent to America by his poor parents because a maid had seduced him and had had a child by him, was sailing into New York Harbour on board the gradually slowing ship, he caught sight again of the Statue of the Goddess of Liberty, which appeared to be lit up by a burst of sunshine.“

Kafka’s America is not a specific country, rather it is a multi-layered portrait, created from myths, projections, facts and fantasies. The journey of emigrant Karl Rossmann takes place in his head; from the arrival into New York harbor to his final train journey to the great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, it is the odyssey of a man seeking a connection, who does not despair of his own isolation to the last, and at the end perhaps even finds the very home he is constantly searching for at the Oklahoma theatre.

Kafka’s epochal work vividly depicts the figure of the ‘outcast’ at the turn of the 20th century – cast out by parents, cast out of Europe. The story of a homeless man, who unlike hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic immigrants, does not see America as a land of opportunity, rather a country of social decline – the antithesis of the likes of the Irish Kennedys or German merchant families, who built a new life for themselves there. Through his depiction of the world of modernity, its gigantic flow of traffic and its hectic world of work, Kafka enables us to be astonished that everything we deem ‘normal’ has, up until very recently, not been so. This production is Kafka’s novel, presented as the phantasm and experience of one solitary actor.

Doors open at 6:30pm with the performance starting at 7pm. A Q&A with the actor and the team from Thalia Theater will take place following the performance.

Free and open to the public. RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/theater-performance-america-based-on-the-novel-by-franz-kafka-tickets-80795325995

About Greenwood Social Hall:
Greenwood Social Hall is the living room and studio of artist Peregrine Honig. The building is one of three spaces to house Greenwood Baptist- a still practicing congregation established in the Stockyards in the late 1800s.

Photo © Fabian Hammerl