This season, chimps are champs. In the recent dark comedy “Trevor,” a chimpanzee dreams of making it as an actor, while in David Ives’ newly revived “All in the Timing,” three primates armed with typewriters try to write “Hamlet.”
Now comes the most poignant entry of all: the monologue “Kafka’s Monkey,” imported from London’s Young Vic by Theatre for a New Audience.
Adapted from Franz Kafka’s 1917 story “A Report to an Academy” by Colin Teevan, the show is a monologue by an ape, who lectures a scientific panel about his journey to speak and act like a human.
In an inspired twist, a woman — the extraordinary Kathryn Hunter — plays the animal playing a man. Wearing the tails, bowler hat and cane of a performing monkey, she displays the acrobatic grace of Chaplin’s Little Tramp and the heartbreaking innocence of Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s “La Strada,” while speaking in an androgynous rasp that recalls Linda Hunt’s. (Happily, we’ll see Hunter again later this month, in an evening of Beckett shorts, “Fragments.”)
On a bare stage dominated by a photo of a melancholy ape, our narrator moves about in a wistful attempt at human posture — bent waist, palms turned back, toes pointed up — and tells us about his capture in Africa, and a hellish trip in a cage so small he can’t stand up or sit.
A scar on his cheek from a hunter’s bullet earns him the name Red Peter, in reference to another monkey. “He died not long ago in possession of a small and very local reputation,” he sniffs — clearly Red Peter thinks he’s better than that middling amateur.
His story unfolds, punctuated by bits of humor as he interacts with the audience, offering one spectator a banana, and picking imaginary fleas from another’s head. At one point, he walks up an aisle and consoles a third: “I think I’ve depressed this gentleman,” he says gently.
At just under an hour, the show, beautifully directed by Walter Meierjohann, has the economy and poetic arc of a fable.
Here, though, the moral is open to interpretation. “Kafka’s Monkey” could be about the price of assimilation, an acute case of Stockholm syndrome or, simply, the cruel way we treat animals. No matter what you make of it, Red Peter’s tale is one to be heard.