This Krummy Life

I wish I knew what kind of name "Krum" is in Polish. Does it feel like "Jim" or more like "Anderson"? I can only guess it feels just as it sounds, Krum -- crumb, crumble. The Polish company TR Warszawa was at BAM with New York premiere of Krum by the late Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin. When I walked into the Harvey, the set, to me, felt like a David Lynch space. Latticed wood floor, walled in perimeters with windows, heavy curtains, lush green/red/blue thick velvet fold-out train beds, a few banks of heavily cushioned theater seats and a projection screen hung in the center of the space. Combined with the incessant (I mean truly, relentless and endless) score of trancey lounge music underscoring the play, it felt, initially, as if a dancing dwarf was going to crawl out of a hole in the ground, or a voluptuous naked lady was going to writhe about in pain in the corner.

What ended up transpiring on stage, over the next near three hours, was something quite different. Somehow evoking Hamlet, Woyzek, Trainspotting, and Naked (Mike Leigh's) all at the same time, here is a story about the futility and wonder of life -- trainwreck marriages (and great ones), diseases, desire, disappointment, fantasies, mutating definitions of success, and death -- the things that humans living in society are all supposed to experience. The desire for and the impotency in rebellion against those things, in the raging attempt to "get out of here."

Krum comes home "from abroad" (though God knows where he's been) decidedly without any gifts or stories. The one thing he has accomplished, he announces proudly, is to avoid getting married. He comes home to his mother, who, like any mother, wants him to live (i.e. make some money at some job, marry a girl and produce offspring). And for the following many years that unfold, everyone around his life does just that. All of this living is happening (albeit painfully, albeit glumly) and Krum alone stands to the periphery of it all, the perpetual observer. Years pass, and his mother still implored him to get a life, but he refuses -- he is a writer, and artist, and cannot be bothered with those kinds of things, and he has just begun (finally) his new novel... and he is still chasing after some impossible fantasy.

It's hard to imagine the portrayal of such a glum existence and environment is pulled off without making the audience want to hang themselves -- but the inventive stage compositions with occasional video montages of modern-day Israel and live feed from the stage, and the rough edges, raw energy, and extreme emotional commitment of the performers, bring incredible amount of compassion and life to a play about how life is meaningless.