O.C. STAGE REVIEW : Bug-Eyed View of Society

Franz Kafka’s famous story “The Metamorphosis” tells the macabre tale of an average man who awakens one morning to find that he has become a giant cockroach. The production currently being staged at Orange Coast College by David Scaglione illuminates the tortured humanity of Kafka’s repulsive hero, who is brought to sympathetic life by actor Mark Coyan.

In an acrobatic performance, Coyan transforms himself very convincingly into a bug. The physicality, the voice, the personality of Gregor Samsa, an overworked, underappreciated salesman, do metamorphose, slowly but surely, into those of a cockroach, a pathetically human cockroach trapped in a world of monstrous humanity.

Gregor the bug is abused and despised more openly but no less hurtfully than was Gregor the unhappy man. He is imprisoned in his room, beaten by his father, rejected by his mother and hated by his sister. His ambitions and pleasures grow ever more narrow, and finally he succumbs to the deadening loneliness of his useless life.

Director Scaglione, who also designed the lights, sets and costumes for the production, has envisioned a black and white world where the angles are askew and the lighting creates grotesque shadows. The original music design by Mike Patrick floats disembodied choral harmonies over a churning synthesizer bass.

The entire mise en scene is as distorted as the familial relationships. The characters surrounding Gregor wear exaggerated makeup, their characterizations drawn in correspondingly broad, cartoonish lines, although Terri Mowrey, as Gregor’s sister, brings more passion to her performance than the other supporting players.

As catalogued by Scaglione in his program note, Kafka’s story has been claimed as an allegory for a host of modern ills that result in the alienation of the individual. Gregor is a victim of The System, in which conformity, greed and prejudice are the guiding principles. Certainly, Gregor may be the symbolic product of the industrial revolution; he also may be a man who has AIDS. This thought-provoking production reveals anew the timeliness of Kafka’s strange parable of civilized man.

‘Metamorphosis’

An Orange Coast College production of Charles Dizenzo’s adaptation of the story by Frank Kafka. Directed by David Scaglione. Production designed by David Scaglione. Original music design by Mike Patrick. With Mark Coyan, Shannin Stevenson, Weston Taussig-Roche, Terri Mowrey, Adam Martin and Debi Ham. Continues today at 5 and 8:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. in the Drama Lab Studio at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $4 in advance, $5 at the door. Information and reservations: (714) 432-5527.