Julian Henry Lowenfeld's Kafka for Beginners is a fiercely stylized descent into the machinery of state-sanctioned madness. This is no mere play, but a fevered cry from the belly of an empire rotten with its own myth-making. Here, power has calcified into ritual, and truth is a currency long outlawed...

In contrast to the unrelentingly bleak totalitarian nightmares of Kafka and Orwell, Lowenfeld's play marshals not just a sense of humor, but the forces of poetry, music and love to leaven the bitterness. He movingly argues that 'if we but live with love, then we must live in truth. For loving is the opposite of lying.' His wrongly imprisoned poet never gives up, never accepts the state's official ideology that 'two plus two is five,' no matter what threats or blandishments get offered him by his charmingly cynical interrogator.