Kafka on the Shore Steppenwolf Theatre Company
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As Galati tells it, the story is by turns baffling and insubstantial. In alternating scenes, two heroes set out on separate journeys that eventually intersect: Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old boy running away from his Tokyo home, and Nakata, a gentle older man who was left mentally impaired by a mysterious accident in grade school during World War II.
Kafka’s is an oedipal coming-of-age tale. Quiet and thoughtful (and a bit sulky in Christopher Larkin’s performance), he winds up in the city of Takamatsu, working and living at a private library overseen by elegant, haunted Miss Saeki, who may be his long-lost mother but mistakes him for her long-dead lover during somnambulistic excursions. Ghosts billow in from time to time, the past overlaps with the present, and Kafka takes a climactic fairy tale-esque trip through a forest that is either the afterlife, his own soul, or both.
The production’s design underscores this. Given the novel’s potential for eye-popping spectacle, Galati’s production is disappointingly spare. One of the book’s most visually striking episodes—a shower of mackerel that falls from the heavens—isn’t even attempted, and Kafka’s primeval forest is suggested by nothing more than a row of vertical beams bathed in green light. The minimalist set, by James Schuette, sometimes works to the story’s advantage, its simplicity throwing the complexities of the plot into sharp relief. But at other times it only makes the adaptation seem more diffuse.
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