Writers make for good characters: they’re tortured, twisted, and vicariously fragmented people. Christine Simpson’s new play, The Great Conjurer takes one of our most irregular writers, Franz Kafka, and shows, under the expert, smooth direction of Kevin Bartlett, how to enhance a traditional play with the use of classic and contemporary flair. For example, masks are used to make Kafka’s family, S, M, and F (sister, mother, and father) seem like the fictions, and stylized movements (choreographed by Wendy Seyb) give life to the internal struggle between a man’s art and a man’s love. As for Kafka, he is split into three characters: K, the man; N, the narrator (who cites from Kafka’s fictions and letters); and G, the creative “bug”—or Mr. Samsa himself—sent to physically pull K away from the real world. Set loose simultaneously, they overlap one another, building momentum in a surge of creativity until K is no more than an amanuensis for his crazed thoughts.Read on at [New Theater Corps]
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