Currently on stage at the Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles is Dietrich Smith’s adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika or, The Man Who Disappeared – which has returned for a limited six-week run at Open Fist Theatre Company. The story follows 17-year-old Karl Rossmann, who is banished by his family from Germany and embarks on a bewildering journey through New York City. Amerika (also known as The Man Who Disappeared or Der Verschollene) is the unfinished first novel by Franz Kafka, written between 1911 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927. Certainly, this is an undertaking by the Open Fist Theatre but was the brainchild of graphic designer and director Dietrich Smith. Dietrich Smith’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika at the Atwater Village Theatre.
Dietrich Smith first staged Amerika in 2022 and this production made a return in February 2026 but with some differences. Oqualili Tshetshe, who was the understudy for the role of Karl, has taken on that role and seems to inhabit the character. Tambrie Allsup and Matthew Goodrich are returning cast members. One significant change is the Smith’s feeling about the final scene that Smith wrote to give a sense of ending to this novel that Kafka never finished. When Franz Kafka wrote his first novel between 1911 and 1914, it was a fantasy of what it would be like to disappear in a country he’d never visited — the United States.
The production of Amerika opened at the end of March and only has a few dates left: Friday, May 6, at 7:30 PM; Saturday, May 2, at 7:00 PM; and Sunday, May 3, at 3:00 PM. The location of the Open Fist Theatre Company and is the Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., in Los Angeles. Tickets range from $26 to $45. For tickets, go to: www.openfist.org.
Dietrich Smith is a graphic artist who has worked with Marvel, DC, MGM, Sony Animation, Riot Games, and many others. He has a deep appreciation of wide range of drama, novels, and poetry. When he became literary manager at Open Fist, he had two projects he wanted to realize – a Faulkner adaptation (which came to fruition with the production of Edward Kemps’ adaptation of “As I Lay Dying” in 2003) and “Amerika.” He did not get around to Amerika until many years later in 2021.
Having written only complete novels, Franz Kafka is generally known for his often times bizarre and surreal narrative. In Amerika, the narrative follows a very German Bildungsroman structure where the picaresque is a major element. Consequently, Amerika or The Man Who Disappeared is not as unconventional as the surreal tale of The Metamorphosis. What drew Smith most to Kafka’s Amerika is its humor and inventiveness, the story of a young man trying to navigate a strange land that lifts him up and then crushes him over and over again.
The genesis of the stage production of Kafka’s Amerika was fostered by Smith work with Gary Rydstrom on the soundscape. Rydstrom is seven-time Academy Award-winning sound designer. The play version of Kafka’s novel has many locations, characters encountered and psychological states of mind on the part of the main character Karl. Gary Rydstrom helped director Smith break the story into stageable chunks and thus we have 8 larger scenes based on locations. As Smith has explained, this storytelling approach led to the over-all design as well as the staging concepts which are highly inventive. The set designs by John R. Dilworth were flexible and easily manipulated used to create the many scenes and amplify the action effectively and often comically.
To create the sense of location, director Rydstrom drew on the animation sequences of John R. Dilworth, who used Kafka’s own stick-figure sketches as a bridge between locations. Kafka’s executor Max Brod published a small selection of Kafka’s drawings starting in 1937, but hundreds of drawings were hidden for decades in a Swiss bank vault until the 2022 release. The Kafka drawings are black and white and simple in design, but Dilworth used them as a model for the animated backdrops in many scenes. As Smith himself has pointed out, “… A large part of the show’s design took off from how best to display and mirror the playfulness of the animated sequences as they started coming over the transom. Without these, it would be a very different production.” It was Max Brod who published Kafka’s Amerika in 1927, three years after Kafka’s death from tuberculosis.
While seeds of the novel can be traced back to the 1890’s when Kafka was still in his teens, he wrote it between 1912 and 1914, a period during which he, by day an accident-insurance lawyer at the semi-state “Workers Accident Insurance Institute,” was advocating for greater safety measures in Bohemian factories. Though notoriously critical of his literary work, he took such pride in his professional articles that he would give his writer friends copies of those precisely worded and persuasively argued pieces on topics such as “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines.” So, no wonder that his engagement with the human cost of rapid industrialization in early 20th century Bohemia fed into his depiction in the novel of social conditions in robber-baron America.
Although Kafka refers to his work-in-progress as Der Verschollene in a November 1912 letter to his eventual fiancée Felice Bauer, his literary executor Max Brod had no access to that correspondence when he brought out posthumously Kafka’s first novel as Amerika (1927). Brod justified that title by stating that Kafka would refer conversationally to the work as his “American story.”
Turning back to the actual staged play version of what was a novel, Dietrich Smith wrote the play as a three-hour drama in three acts with two intermissions. The first scene introduces us to the 17-year-old Karl Rossman who is on a ship headed to New York City from Germany in some unspecified time prior during the period of the Robber Barons in the 1890s.
Seventeen-year-old Karl Roßmann (Rossmann), who was forced to go to New York City to escape the scandal of getting a housemaid pregnant. On the deck, he sees the State of Liberty as a sword-bearing avenging angel. As the others line up to disembark at Ellis Island, Karl (Oqalile Tshetshe) realizes that he has left his umbrella down below. So, he runs down seemingly endless sets of stairs in search of his umbrella – graphically portrayed in charming animated vignettes from John R. Dilworth (the creator of “Courage the Cowardly Dog,”). Karl ends up at the bottom of the ship in the engine room with the ship’s stoker. There Karl becomes friends with a stoker who is about to be dismissed from his job. Karl identifies with the stoker and decides to help him; together they go to see the captain (Elliott Moore) of the ship. Karl’s sense of justice is what motivates him to tale the stoker to see the ship’s captain.
In typically Kafkaesque fashion, this simple act develops into a complex odyssey: He loses his way and, as a result, meets the Stoker (Jeremy D. Thompson), the first of many ambiguous guides and fellow sufferers. After listening to the Stoker’s litany of wrongs suffered, Karl accompanies him to the ship’s office, where the authorities’ indifference prompts Karl to advocate the Stoker’s case. That Karl should speak with such assurance about a man he hardly knows appears entirely natural given the dream logic of Kafka’s seemingly realistic literary work. In such a world, where sudden and comically absurd appearances are the norm rather than the exception, it is equally natural that his defense of the Stoker should lead Karl to his wealthy Uncle Jacob (or a man who believes Karl to be his nephew). In Kafka’s fiction, everything is plausible and everything is in doubt.
In a surreal turn of events, Karl’s uncle, Senator Jacob (played by Pat Towne), happens to be on the ship in a meeting with the captain. Karl does not know that Senator Jacob is his uncle, but Mr. Jacob recognizes him and takes him away from the stoker. As we discover in the next scene in New York City, Uncle Jacob’s protection is a mixed blessing. Even as he shields Karl from all the harshness of the immigrant experience, Uncle Jacob in effect imprisons his nephew in his house. It seems that Kafka saw his Uncle Jacob character as having a similar authoritarian personality like Kafka’s own father. His Uncle hires a tutor (Julie Santana) to help Karl learn English He forces him to learn to play the piano and become an apprentice to the business practices on which he has made his enormous wealth. He deprives Karl of any chance of freedom and demands total submission to his authority.
Uncle Jacob introduces Karl to two of his business associates: Mr. Pollander (Jeremy D. Thompson) and Mr. Green (Jack Sharpe). When Karl chooses to accept an offer to spend the weekend at the luxurious country estate of Mr. Pollander, he does so without his uncle’s full approval. Things soon go awry. This man has most demanding and aggressive daughter named Klara (Tandre Allsop) who wants to hear Karl play the piano and attempts to seduce him in a very physically brutal way. This problematic young woman seems drawn from Kafka’s own difficult relations with women.
Karl wants to get out of this countryside mansion and fails to meet his uncle’s request that Karl be at an event the next day. The adolescent protagonist soon finds himself at the mercy of his imperious uncle, who puts his nephew out on the street for missing a midnight curfew, of which poor Karl was quite unaware Uncle Jacob banishes Karl from his house, his protection, and his sight. He watches Karl make his own choice and then suffer the consequences of his own decision, without first warning him of the effects.
Penniless, Karl cannot find work in New York City, where every business seems connected to his powerful uncle. Wandering aimlessly, he becomes friends with two drifters – an Irishman named Robinson (Matthew Goodrich) and a French immigrant named Delamarche (Elliott Moore). They promise to find him a job, but they sell his suit without permission, eat his food in front of him without offering him any, and ransack his belongings. Karl is most upset about the two having taken his only photograph of his mother and father. Karl departs from them on bad terms.
So, Karl decided not to follow the two drifters in their search for jobs in another city. He stays at a cheap hotel where a grumpy innkeeper (Tambrie Allsop) offers him a room with two other strange men. He wanders off to a huge hotel where after he is offered a job by a manager at Hotel Occidental. That hotel manager (Maria Mastroyannis) is an understanding German woman who is in charge of the hotel. She arranged for him to get a job a lift-boy. Here we get to see the clever animated backdrop of the enormous set of elevators in this grand hotel. This is a most entertaining, almost Chaplin-esque depiction of such a hotel.
The lift-boys are quite entertaining, especially the Italian one named Giacomo (Jade Santana). It turns out that the hotel manager has a shy stenographer named Theresa (Grace Soens) who takes a liking to young Karl. There seems to begin Karl’s second dalliance with a woman. Sometimes riding in his “lift” is a mysterious German woman (Emma Bruno) – a single mother with an infant. Pat Town reappears at the bullish Head Waiter at the Hotel Occidental.
One day Robinson (Matthew Goodrich), the Irish drifter, shows up drunk at his work asking him for money. Afraid of losing his job if seen talking with a friend, which is forbidden for lift-boys, Karl agrees to lend him money. Robinson is obviously sick-drunk and Karl then commits the far worse offence of bunking a drunk-sick Robinson in the lift-boy dorm of the hotel. When Karl is reported missing from his job, the head waiter at the hotel hauls him into his office and interrogates him.
Being dismissed for leaving his post, Karl agrees not only to pay for Robinson’s taxi, (driven by a loquacious Julian Thompson), but also joins him in their tenement apartment. Here the animated backdrop captures the climb up broken staircases and trash-filled rooms. Karl arrives at Delamarche’s place. Delamarche is now staying with a wealthy and obese opera singer named Brunelda (Julia Santana) whose voice we hear, but never actually see her. She wants to take in Karl as her servant. Karl refuses, but Delamarche physically forces him to stay and he is imprisoned in her apartment. He tries to break out, but is beaten by Delamarche and Robinson. Karl gets chased down by a policeman (Jack Sharpe). On the balcony, he chats with a student who tells him he should stay, because it is hard to find a job elsewhere. He decides to stay.
In the novel, Karl happens to see an advertisement for the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, which is looking for employees. In the version staged by Dietrich Smith, Karl finds in his coat pocket this advertisement which he picked up in the lift of the hotel before. The theatre promises to find employment for everyone. Karl applies for a job and gets engaged as a “technical worker.” He is then sent to Oklahoma by train and is welcomed by the vastness of the valleys and adopts the name “Negro” as his own.
In the last completed chapter, to which Kafka’s literary executor Brod gave the offkey title “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma,” Kafka weaves into the narrative some of the existential, mythical, and metaphysical motifs that are familiar to readers of his later work. In the opening lines of this chapter, written in October 1914 along with the still shocking story “In the Penal Colony” while Kafka was taking a break from composing “The Trial,” Karl is beguiled by a poster proclaiming that “Everyone is welcome” into applying for a position in an enigmatic theatrical organization. Like the rest of a thin stream of applicants, he is greeted on arrival at the hiring site with a great flourish by hundreds of trumpet-blowing women “dressed as angels in white robes with large wings on their backs.”
Karl decides to board the train to Oklahoma with some other people (Tambrie Allsop, Grace Soens, Emma Bruno) seeking a new opportunity in the mythical American West Having been unjustly fired several times, Karl has grown wary of disclosing his name. So, when an official (Jeremy D. Thompson) of the all-embracing but possibly foreboding theatrical organization asks him for his name, he answers “Negro. . . the nickname from his last few positions.” Kafka’s use of that word was carefully considered: At first, he had Karl reply “Leo,” but after finishing that section he went back and crossed out “Leo,” replacing it nine times with “Negro.”
The fate of Karl, now known as Negro, remains murky. Though the hiring process turns out to be a bureaucratic obstacle course, he is finally taken on not as the artist a welcoming angel saw in him nor as the engineer he impulsively claims to be, but rather as a technician. Kafka leaves us with ambiguous images of the now “carefree” Karl traveling with a theatrical troupe through a fantastical depiction of the Rockies, where “broad mountain rivers swept forward in great waves over the craggy base, pushing along thousands of small foamy waves, plunging under the bridges over which the train passed, and coming so close that the breath of their chill makes one’s face quiver.”
Kafka’s affinity with Black people arose at least in part from his sense of himself as a Jew in an increasingly hostile Central European environment. In a letter to his first Czech translator, and, briefly, lover, Milena Jesenská, in August 1920 he claimed that as far as Europeans are concerned both he and her Jewish husband “have the same Negro face.” This sense of an affinity between Jews and Blacks may have it origins in an originally anti-Semitic trope of Jews’ supposed “blackness.” He also mentions having recently overheard someone calling the Jews a “mangy race” and ponders whether it isn’t natural “to leave a place where one is so hated?”
This brings us to the original casting of Karl Rossman as a Black man in this stage version of Kafka’s Amerika. In Dietrich Smith’s rendering of Kafka’s Amerika, he chose to cast a black actor (Oqulile Tshetshe) in the lead role of Karl. Could Karl, who early in the novel plays the piano stirringly and imagines that his performance “might directly affect his situation in America,” find in this flamboyant artistic community a lasting refuge?
There are fine performances by all the actors in the cast – they are called upon to fill 26 different roles with rapid-fire costume changes. Credit needs to be given to the smart period costumes by A. Jeffery Schoeberg. Oqalile Tshetshe, who inhabits his role as Karl with complexity, depth, and grace. He is an emerging actor and performer, known now for taking on the lead role of Karl Rossmann in the 2026 Los Angeles remount of Kafka’s Amerika, Or the Man Who Disappeared at the Atwater Village Theatre. He is actively involved in theater, including Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) auditions, and has shared his work on Instagram. Tshetshe was cast as Karl in the Open Fist/Circle X co-production of Amerika. The casting of Tshetshe is especially interesting in a tale about mostly German immigrants in America around 1914. The sense of foreignness is amplified by Tshetshe’s own background as a South African. Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared is basically a satire but its relevance to the America of our time in 2026 is quite apparent.
