The Insect Comedy, or The World We Live In (1921), by the brothers Čapek (Karel and Josef), will be the beneficiary of a new production in Westmont College’s Porter Theatre, opening this Friday, Feb. 27, and running through March 7.
It is directed by John Blondell with sets by Danila Korogdsky, costumes by Miller James, lighting Jonathan Hicks, choreography by Victoria Finlayson, and starring nearly a score of the most talent actors and dancers at Westmont.
The premise is fairly simply: A tramp goes into a forest, falls asleep and dreams that he encounters three different insect societies — butterflies, dung beetles, ants — who demonstrate their particular resemblance to a corresponding human society — lovers, capitalists, proletarians. The points the play makes about humans, through the interactions of our insect avatars, are obvious, though none the less powerful for being easy to grasp.
A quarter-century later, George Orwell would make similar points with his fantasy Animal Farm. (Doesn’t this sound like it was destined to be a John Blondell project, even though it was written well before there was a John Blondell?)
The great literary critic Walter Benjamin dubbed Paris “The Capital of the 19th Century.” There is quite a strong case to be made for dubbing Vienna — or the Habsburg trinity that also includes Prague and Budapest — “The Capital of the 20th Century.” This is not particularly good news, of course, since the typical Central European solution, to the insoluble problems of modern life, was suicide. Still, wherever Freud and Kafka and Schoenberg — and the Čapeks — looked, they seem to have found the future.
It was seldom pretty. Though not Jewish, the Čapeks were strongly and vocally anti-Nazi, and had Karel Čapek not died of double pnuemonia on Dec. 25, 1938 (age 48) — just after the Nazis had annexed the Sudetenland, just before they swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia — it’s likely that he would shared the fate of Josef, who died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April, 1945, just before the Nazi surrender ended World War Two in Europe. Even if they had both lived through the war, they would have found themselves in a Czechoslovakia firmly under the thumb of the totalitarian Soviet Union, where it remained for the next forty years.
“Today,” Blondell says, “the play seems downright prophetic considering the time of its writing and the madness that was to grip Europe still 15 or so years in the future. Though written in a decidedly different time and place, the play appears completely timely, pertinent and relevant — by turns, the play depicts scenes about the perils and pitfalls of romantic love; the desire for security and safety in a perilous, hectic modern world; and the larger global threats to personal and communal living.
“Though all this sounds very serious, the play is indeed a comedy, and we are working hard for it to be at once fantastic, human and funny. [It] has been at times exciting, harrowing, confusing and thrilling to stage. The trick is to find the humanity in the situations, to create moments that feel and seem potent and recognizable, all the while hanging onto the notion that the Čapeks read human life through that of the lives of insects.”
The Insect Comedy plays at 8:30 p.m. Fridays Feb. 27 and March 6, at 8 p.m. Saturdays Feb. 28 and March 7, and at 2 p.m. March 7. Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students, seniors and children, and they can be purchased at the door or online by clicking here.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.