“I think,” said Franz Kafka in a letter of 1904, “we ought to read only books that bite and sting us …What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”
I remembered Kafka’s quote after I saw Agnes of God in the somewhat crude but still shattering production that Stageworks is currently offering at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. John Pielmeier’s play, which I first witnessed in a workshop at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in 1979, may have received more restrained productions during its thirty years of life, but the Stageworks version has an elemental violence that strikes right at that frozen sea we all depend upon for our normal functioning.
Watching the amazing Dahlia Legault (pictured, photo courtesy Brian Becker Photography) relive the agonizing birth of her impossible baby, watching Hersha Parady and Eileen Koteles swing away at each other like two battered prizefighters who want the opponent destroyed, we’re made spectators not only of a suspenseful, well-crafted play, but also of fundamental antagonisms that run deep beneath our culture. This is a play about primary things:
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2010.