FROM AROUND THE WORLD: NEW YORK CITY.(Brief Article)

Philip Glass's career as a composer for the theater has had its peaks (such as Orphee) and valleys (La Belle et la Bete, also based on a Cocteau film). His recent one-act chamber opera, In the Penal Colony, based on Franz Kafka's nightmarish, eponymous short story (1914), is definitely one of Glass's freshest and strongest. First produced by a longtime Glass collaborator (and ex-wife), avant-garde director JoAnne Akalaitis, at Seattle's A Contemporary Theatre in the fall of 2000, the project moved to Chicago's Court Theatre and then to Manhattan's Classic Stage Company in June and July. (Because the opera's two singing roles were taken by alternating pairs of men, this report is on two performances in the CSC engagement.)

The surface of Kafka's story is cruelly straightforward. A foreign visitor in some unspecified capacity is asked by a tropical penal colony's commander to witness the execution of a soldier charged with insubordination. The commander's purpose is to get official agreement with his own opinion that the method of execution, devised by his deceased predecessor, is excessively inhumane and should be abolished. The procedure involves a huge machine in which the prisoner is strapped to a vibrating bed and pierced, over a period of twelve hours, with an assembly of needles that carve into his body the particular laws or rules he has violated. Halfway through the ordeal, he's made to accept his guilt and rejoice in his last hours of atonement. The officer carrying out the execution was devoted to the dead commander and considers the machine an instrument of divine justice. Having tried eloquently but in vain to persuade the visitor to endorse the machine to the new commander, the officer releases the condemned prisoner and assumes his place in the apparatus, which goes quite haywire and causes a swifter but even more horrible death.

That's the story's surface, but Kafka, of course, reveals depths involving, among other moral, mental and spiritual issues, the aggrandizement and idolatry of petty law and the transformation of the machine into a deity. Akalaitis, for her part, widened (while not deepening) the theatrical material by making Kafka himself a sometime commentator, sometime participant, quoting from the author's diaries without apparent relevance to the execution but sharing or counter-pointing some of the characters' gestures and movements. Luckily, librettist Rudolph Wurlitzer's English reduction of the story is spare enough to make room for such activity.

More central to the point, Glass's music accommodates Akalaitis's notions comfortably. It's an economic as well as emotionally persuasive score, relying vocally on unpretentiously telling arioso and recitative. The singers are the Visitor (tenor) and Officer (bass-baritone). The Prisoner, his Guard and Kafka are actors, and the ...