A Nightmare Without Force

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

METAMORPHOSIS Adapted by Steven Berkoff from a story by Franz Kafka

In a Broadway season when eight of the eleven new plays have been comedies, three of them sex farces, and the cheapest of four new musicals cost $5 million to stage, it is heartening to see work as simple, spare and serious as Metamorphosis. One just wishes it were better. Despite an effective stage- acting debut by dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, the most ballyhooed highbrow event in the theater so far this year is all but bereft of emotional force. At the finale, two actresses stand rigid, their cheeks glazed with tears, yet much of the audience reacts only with uneasy titters. Director Steven Berkoff's highly stylized script and direction circle around the story, adding layer upon layer of ornament, when what is needed is a clean, quick cut to the emotional core of an incident as simple as it is mysterious.

Nothing is wrong with the source material, which has inspired countless other stage adaptations. Franz Kafka's story of a man who one day wakes up as a giant insect has provided one of the 20th century's hallmark nightmare images. The essence of the horror is that there is no explanation for it, no deeper meaning, no instructive or redemptive metaphor: the suffering just is. In the transmutation of Gregor Samsa, the world ceases to be predictable or rational; natural and moral order disappear. Critics have found in Kafka's vision hints of everything from the Holocaust to AIDS. But to burden the story with greater weight is in fact to lessen it. The thump in the gut comes from the literal details. The man who used to hurry to work now scuttles beneath the bed; the fastidious fellow who loved milk now detests "the fresher foods" and slurps deafeningly over anything decayed. When he agonizes with wounds inflicted by members of his family, they cannot bear to touch him to help heal him.

Berkoff manages to convey the essence of the dilemma for Gregor's parents and sister, albeit without the least sympathy for their natural anxiety and revulsion. He is far more interested in portraying them as grasping and money mad, in a Marxist gloss on the plight of the worker. They are so coarse and reprehensible -- more animalistic when eating than the bug in the back bedroom , -- that there is no point of connection for the audience, certainly no creative tension between expecting the family to take a noble course and knowing why it succumbs to a selfish one.

It is not quite right to say the performances are bad. Presumably at Berkoff's behest, they are as exaggerated as in a Victorian melodrama, the emotional colors underlined by music as tinkly or percussive as in Beijing opera. In a further attempt to weight the scales in favor of the sensitive outcast, Baryshnikov's speeches are candidly written and delivered with touching directness. Most remarkable, however, are his agility and grace in evoking the lumbering, graceless creature. Skittering across the floor, or toppled over backward and trying to right himself, or dangling from the spider web of piping that represents a ceiling, Baryshnikov is completely believable as both misfortunate man and misunderstood beast.