A Country Doctor, a play by Len Jenkin, based on the short story by Franz Kafka.

 

"To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard." --Franz Kafka.

 

A Country Doctor is an unconventional, Kafka-inspired play that begins at 8 pm at the Back Door Theater, at 4319 Hawthorne Blvd, in Portland, Oregon. Here's the link for more info: http://www.defunktheatre.co... On Thursdays the tickets cost "Pay-what-you-will;" usually they're $10-15.  The performance continues till October 3.

 

The space is a black box theater that is indeed through the back door, behind a café.  I sat in the front row, which meant that my feet were on the “stage,” and sometimes I was afraid my knees would get in the way of actors, or I’d end up with an actor in my lap.  I had similar experiences during my undergraduate days, when I saw plays very frequently, so it’s nothing new.

 

"A Country Doctor" has no intermission and ends at about 9:15, and the actors don't come out to bow, so I was a bit confused at the end! I guess it's one of those weird, avant-garde things.  I wasn’t entirely certain that the play was over, until some of the actors came out in t-shirts and shorts and carrying backpacks.  If I had read the story shortly beforehand, I would not have been confused. 

 

Kafka lived in the early twentieth century, but the props for the play were from different eras, despite the mention of horses and a carriage.  The actor playing the doctor varies (and isn’t always male), and in one scene the country doctor answers a cell phone, but the person on the other end of the line talks through a tin can on a string.  There are waiting room magazines, and they look like they’re from sometime between the 1940s and the 1960s.

 

A line from the play is, “I had to start an urgent journey; a seriously ill patient was waiting for me in a village ten miles off; a thick blizzard of snow…” and now that I have Kafka’s short story “A Country Doctor” in front of me, I see that this is from the beginning of the story.  In the surreal and absurdist play, weird stuff happens and Franz Kafka himself is on the way to a TB sanatorium, but the performance keeps going back to the country doctor.

 

I didn't know Kafka wrote about zombies!  After the show, an audience member said, “There are zombies in everything now.”

 

The play is weird and eerie but also funny, in part because of the unrealistic stage effects.  For instance, a tricycle behind an actor with two papier-mâché horse heads on his hands represents a carriage and horses; this is accompanied by a recording of horsey noises such as whinnying.

 

“I had discovered your great wound; this blossom on your side was killing you.”  While the patient does have a physical wound, I took that as also a symbolic, psychological wound. 

 

Sometimes an actor narrates, such as saying, “I checked my uninhabited pig sty….” And then suddenly another actor pops up and says something loud and cheerful.  The first actor replies, “Who are you and what are you doing in my uninhabited pig sty?” 

 

Another scene involves a narrator mentioning a party with literary discussion.  The “literary discussion” is represented by three performers standing around holding old books open and talking through sock puppets!  

 

Now that I’ve already seen the play, I’ve finally read the short story, and indeed a lot of it is in the play, although I think the play is much funnier.  With a first-person narrator, it is about the doctor going to the young patient’s farmhouse and the parents standing nearby and involves the same basic scene with the doctor and patient, but without jumping to scenes that aren’t in the short story.  All the narration that I mentioned in the play is from the original story.  There’s even a fascinating scene in which Franz Kafka goes to see his father, who is in his sick bed (actually lying inside a large cloth bag on the central wooden platform) and the play shows a bit of Kafka’s relationship with his domineering father.

 

I want to say from time to time:  "Who are you and what are you doing in my uninhabited pig sty?"

 

Information on Franz Kafka and on “The Country Doctor” can be found on Wikipedia.org.

 

Kafka, Franz.  The Complete Stories and Parables.  Quality Paperback Book Club, NY:  1971.