What do you get when a TED Talk meets a short story? A theatre production born from Franz Kafka’s German short story “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.”
Kafka was known for using humour to address dark topics on a human level; thematically, those topics appealed to Austrian director Myriel Meissner, who chose Kafka’s work to adapt into her theatre production How to Become a Human in 5 Years because of the universal human themes the work tackles. The production is done in a unique way in the form of a TED Talk combined with theatre, says Meissner.
“The whole thing started because I was searching for a show, or a theatre piece, that was kind of humorous and also sort of political in a way. It’s the kind of work I like to do,” says Meissner, who studied theatre performance at Lewis and Clark College in Portland.
Kafka’s work reaches people, she says, and allows both Meissner and audience members to reflect in ways that they might not necessarily feel comfortable doing without the humour.
“People kind of shut down more [when humour isn’t there],” says Meissner.
Being from Austria, Meissner looked into some other German plays first but found that they tended to focus too much on German culture for an international show; she looked at American plays and found that they, too, were difficult to relate to on an international level.
“And then I found Kafka,” she says. “His texts are pretty universal. He’s known for being an existentialist writer with pretty dark humour. I stumbled upon his texts and I loved it immediately.”
Kafka’s short story, originally published in 1917, focuses on an ape named Red Peter who learns human skills to integrate himself into the human world. Sometimes stories, plays, and movies get very casually translated into another medium, becoming almost unrecognizable, but Meissner says this production is relatively close to the original text and that she wanted to stay true to the language in Kafka’s work.
“I started with a literal translation of the text, which is a lot about, ‘Where can we use this?’ and thinking about all the different meanings in Kafka’s language that are usable,” says Meissner. “It’s one of the most important things about him.”
From Meissner’s depiction of words on a page, her own creativity came knocking.
“From that, I built the concept for the show, which is this TED Talk,” she says. “The whole concept is really basic.”
The title of the Kafka story, translated into English, is “A Report to an Academy,” so the medium needed to work for giving a presentation, says Meissner; she felt a TED Talk was perfect for that.
“The TED Talk has this very funny medium of, ‘We’re going to talk spreading ideas… I don’t really have much to tell you, but here’s my story. And I don’t really have anything scientific to tell you, or maybe not really what you want to hear,’” says Meissner.
But Meissner didn’t want the show to be just a TED Talk, so she combined the TED Talk format with the theatrical and storytelling elements above into How to Become a Human in 5 Years.
“The TED Talk is the right frame, but the show really breaks out of it,” says Meissner. “It was a very intimate work between a director and an actor.”
How to Become a Human in 5 Years
(at the Victoria Fringe Festival)
6:45 pm, until Sunday, September 2
$9, Downtown Activity Centre
intrepidtheatre.com